It's still the licensed ARMv7-A architecture. But you're right the cores themselves are not licensed. I agree - I was wrong about the iPhone 8 GPU being Apple's first designed core.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Apple Reportedly Shifts to In-House Modem Engineering Led by Johny Srouji
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
A4/5 are ARM core licensed, all other A series CPU are ARM architecture licensed. Unless one day Apple want to invent their own ISA or switch to MIPS/RISC-v, this won't change.
Good for you.
The modem on my X is by far the worst I've experienced in an apple product.
My 6s and my First Gen. iPad Pro get full bars of LTE in places my X struggles to keep and connectivity at all.
Same goes for all my X, XR and XS operating friends.
Maybe he knows just how much less reliant on Intel Apple plans to be and decided he didn't want to be anywhere near te running.
Poor . Seemingly in conflict with every vendor. Always wanting to control everything. Other Android smart phone manufacturers aren't in this pickle and they're making billion$ and selling millions too. There's something deeply out of whack going on here.
Apple does not make the best chips by a long shot. Kettle brand is far and away better.
You do understand that even GSM and 3G are still supported today. It'll be probably decades before older support can be "chucked".
How is bringing costly design in-house financially practical when sales are down 15% on top of low market share? In this situation out sourcing makes more sense. Or, is this smoke and mirrors to save face when they return to using Qualcomm but with an agreement where they can claim it's designed in-house, like with ARM SoC and multi-touch display, because the average Joe's swallow that up and it'll help boost share price? Worst case they go Mediatek which is even lower cost than Intel but probably performs slightly better. Still no match for Qualcomm though.
You are using a very narrow definition of "design." I was a CPU designer for a decade at AMD, Exponential, and Sun, so I understand how chips are designed, and I know what Apple did and did not do. Apple took did not take off-the-shelf cortex A9 cores. They did the entire microarchitecture design, the logic design, the circuit design, and the physical design themselves. They were compatible with the A9 architecture, but that's it. Just like when AMD designs CPUs they are actually designing them even though they are just "x86-64 cores."
The A4, on the other hand, involved using off-the-shelf cores. And A6 went even further into starting with blank sheets of paper for RTL.
Although their ARM development is second to none. They are so far ahead they’re almost out of sight.
Apple has been moving towards control of all aspects of iPhone production for a while now. And that’s the operative word, ‘control’, so they are not at the mercy of third parties.
Do you have a data sheet for the A series?
[doublepost=1549562086][/doublepost]
What percentage does Apple hold?
To put it into perspective, Broadcom attempted for nearly two decades and gave up. Tried to acquire Qualcomm and failed. Even with the capable Israelis it's probably closer to half a decade at best.
Guess it depends on what you mean by 5 years. Five years until it is in a device? Five years until usable silicon (meaning 6-7 years in a device)? Just because this effort has become more public, does not mean that it just started (I have no idea when or if they are doing this, just pointing out that some times things take a bit before they bubble up to the surface).
