The much awaited iPhone 5 was launched yesterday. Apple has proved with this launch that they are simply the best. They have become the first one to use an A6 chip in their device and that too in iPhone 5. News circling in the market was of the A5X chip being used in iPhone 5 too. The A6 chip has taken everyone with surprise. The chip has been stamped S5L8950X.
The presence of this chip in iPhone 5 was not mentioned anywhere not even on the specifications page of iPhone 5 on Apple’s website. Apple itself has also made a comparison between the new iPhone 5 and its predecessors, iPhone 4S and iPhone 4. The A6 chip was mentioned in this comparison but without any further details on the technicalities of this chip.
In their press conference yesterday executive members of Apple refrained from mentioning the specifications of this this chip like core counts and clock speeds. However they seemed very anxious in bringing the spotlight towards the two times enhanced CPU and GPU used in the phone which ultimately has increased its performance.
With the launch of iPhone 5 Apple has become the first mobile company to launch the ARM’s Cortex A15 CPU into the market. A very skilled person when it comes to semiconductors, Anand lal Shimpi of AnandTech, also gave his comments on the powerful CPU. He said,†Based on the performance gains, Apple’s history of SoC naming and some other stuff we’ve heard recently, it looks like Apple has integrated two ARM Cortex A15 cores on Samsung’s 32nm LP HK+MG process.†He further said that it is a very large jump for Apple while beating Samsung and Texas Instruments (TI) at the same time.
Apart from TI and Samsung, Nvidia and Broadcom was also in league to release A15s but have failed. All the four companies mentioned above had made a statement to release A15s in Exynos 5250 for Samsung, Tegra 4 (code-named Wayne) for Nvidia, a system-on-chip by Broadcom, TI’s OMAP5 application processor but Apple did it first. ARM’s two Cortex-A15 cores along with two mail GPU cores are expected to be present in Samsung’s Exynos 5.
ARM’s Cortex-A9 CPU core was used previously in A5 chip (iPhone 4S, iPad 2) and A5X chip (iPad 3). Cortex A15 core, according to ARM, has 40% greater speed than Cortex A-9. All the previous chips were built on Samsung’s 45-nanometer process. A15s is built on the 32-nanometer process by Samsung, thus making low-power performance possible. Using this technology a faster clocked application has been developed in A15 as compared to A-8.
Despite all the technologies present in iPhone 5 its battery time is much better than the previous Apple products. According to Apple, the standby time for iPhone 4S was only 200 hours while is 225 hours for iPhone 5. However, the talk time is same for both iPhone 4S and iPhone 5. Browsing time in iPhone 4S was only six hours on 3D while is 8 hours for iPhone 5. While when using Wi-Fi the time increases up to ten hours and the LTE browsing time is eight hours.
When launching applications, interchanging between the apps, while capturing photo or expending the image from 8 mega pixel to 28 mega pixel, when playing high graphic games or when using the Apple apps such as iMove you will appreciate the two fold speed of CPU in every step.
All the graphics benefits in A15 are all provided by the UK-based semiconductor maker Imagination Technologies. Graphics for A5, A4 and A4S have also been provided by the same company.
