Teardown of Apple's A6 Chip Reveals Manual Layout of Custom Dual-Core CPU

[ConCat]

Yes, each chip is handmade. They require people with tiny hands to lay out each one. Which is why they employ children (and elves when they are available). This is also why there's a backlog of iPhone 5s, as it can take weeks to months to make each chip. So if you place an order now, it could take many months before the chipmaker gets to your order. But rest assured, that chip will be handmade to your exact specifications. That's the luxury of a bespoke chip.

They are also required to have exceptional eyesight and motor control with which they can manipulate circuits on a 32nm level.

 

[firewood]

I still don't get the manual placement and how it differs from the norm.

The physical design of a chip is like a giant connect-the-dots puzzle. In the olden days, when I first started doing chip designs that only had several thousand transistors, this was done by hand on giant sheets of plastic paper using colored pencils and erasers. A lead designer would break the problem into blocks, and other designers would figure out the best way to do each block (place each dot and figure the shortest line between dots with only so many overpasses over/under other wires allowed, etc.)

With millions, to the neighborhood of billions, of transistors, this became too big a puzzle for ordinary engineers to do by hand. So some giant computer program, a distant relative of the google map router, woud figure out the puzzle. But the result usually ends up looking like a big dense uniform blob. Look at the center of the GPUs for an example. Sort of blends everything all the same looking.

But, just a someone with intimate knowledge of their local neighborhood can sometimes figure out a better shortcut than the google maps route, the smartest most experienced chip designers can still sometimes figure out how to cleverly break the giant puzzle into smaller blocks, and tweak the insides of each block individually to have shorter wires. Look at the center of the CPUs to see this hand-work. The subdivision into smaller blocks and groups of blocks which can each be optimized separately by different specialists.

The A15 core is likely mostly computer placed and routed. This Apple A6 custom CPU core looks more like the old days when a lot of clever puzzle solving went into making really fast chips.

 

[firewood]

The Apple A6 processor is Apple's first custom-designed processor

This may or may not be true. Decades ago, there were rumors of other Apple custom-designed processors that never made it out the door.

 

[Dammit Cubs]

Logistics, and manufactured by Samsung? Not apple, and the A15 core is a ARM design, not an Apple design. As for Innovation the Krait core does something very similar to the Apple A6 and was brought out to the market over 6 months ago. I'm not sure how this is any innovation on Apple's part. The iphone 6 only really has one new innovation it brings to the market...Apple Maps...and we all know how most people out there feel about it.

Please come back to me when you get a brain.

 

[cosmolv]

it is amazing! doing this manually it is unimaginable hard work it requires super precise work, really smart engineering and super BIG patience - impressive! (i don't imagine before how Apple cares about this)

If somebody know how hard it is in this level - there are millions of transistors and wiring this together by hand is just stunning. Of course you need only do one manual wiring, then for the rest it gets automaticly, but manual wiring is pain in the ass!

i just can't find right words how impressive this is!

 

[joeblough]

it is amazing! doing this manually it is unimaginable hard work it requires super precise work, really smart engineering and super BIG patience - impressive! (i don't imagine before how Apple cares about this)

If somebody know how hard it is in this level - there are millions of transistors and wiring this together by hand is just stunning. Of course you need only do one manual wiring, then for the rest it gets automaticly, but manual wiring is pain in the ass!

i just can't find right words how impressive this is!

again, explained previously, they did not hand route the entire SoC. they may have hand placed/routed a very small part of the CPU. what they definitely did do is design the floorplan themselves. when you look at the big squares in the die photographs of the CPU portion of the SoC, you're looking at the floorplan boundaries for the various sub-blocks in the CPU. the auto placement/routing has filled up those boundaries with cells and wiring.

also, they are dealing at the level of standard cells, which can have 10-20 transistors each. the cells are logic gates (AND, OR, NOR, XOR, etc.) and flip-flops. they never wire individual transistors together - they use a standard cell library at the very least.

there are many software programs to help engineers do this work. the spacing rules for wiring and cells are built into the program.

 

[BvizioN]

The iphone 6 only really has one new innovation it brings to the market...Apple Maps...and we all know how most people out there feel about it.

Is it already out? Holly Jesus, time seem to have moved really fast since September 2012!!!

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Really? The quad core version of the Galaxy SIII performs better then the iPhone 5, atleast according to geekbench.

What geekbench? The Android version of it?

 

[Natasha ley]

Is Samsung going to sue over this too?

Definitely yes and also with cheaper price.

 

[santaliqueur]

Trying to explain ASIC design to people with no computer engineering experience is like trying to speak to a tree and make it understand Shakespear.

"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."
-Albert Einstein