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A6 is the first A series with Apple's own CPU.
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.
 
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.
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.
 
I've never had a problem with them in my iPhone 7, X & Xs.

Do you really think Apple will nail modems on their first attempt? Apple does everything on the cheap so don't expect their in-house modems to be revolutionary.

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.
 
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.
 
You do understand that even GSM and 3G are still supported today. It'll be probably decades before older support can be "chucked".
They seemed to have nailed their iPhone on first attempt; their in-house A processors on first attempt; their watch on first attempt; their....
As far as Apple doing everything on the cheap - you obviously have never looked at their R&D spending.
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What a load of nonsense.
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AFAIK the "huge majority of modem technology" you're talking about is for 4G and below. Qualcomm's hold is much weaker on the 5G side. Maybe Apple can include its own 5G on-chip with the Ax processor and use Intel for for the older stuff. When 5G is ubiquitous, that chip could 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.
 
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"Fully designed" by Apple? No. Apple put together two ARM Cortex-A9 CPU cores and one Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU core, and then Samsung fabbed and packaged it. Not trying to imply what Apple did was easy - it is still an amazing feat on a first attempt. But to say they "fully designed" that is laughable.

As I said above, the first time Apple "fully designed" a complex IC was the iPhone 8 where Apple designed the GPU cores.

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.
 
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.

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.
 
Feels too late for thier first 5G iPhones in 2020, I'm guessing it's Intel for the first two generations of 5G iphones, then in house.
 
If they are just starting, they are a minimum of two years away.

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.
 
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).
 
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