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First Photo of Apple's A10 Chip for iPhone 7 Appears With Mid-July Production Date

MacRumors said:



Less than one month before Apple is expected to announce the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, Chinese repair shop GeekBar has shared the first photo of what appears to be the next-generation A10 chip destined for the smartphones on Weibo. The number of pins appears to be consistent with the A9 chip's 64-bit LPDDR4 interface.

While the photo could easily be faked, the chipset is labeled with a 1628 date code, corresponding with mid-July production. Additionally, GeekBar has accurately leaked components for unreleased Apple products in the past, including the iPhone 6s display assembly and iPhone 6 schematics showing a 128GB storage option.

A10-chip.jpg

What is pictured here is not the complete A10 chip and may be the RAM layer that is stacked on top of the A10 wafer as one system-on-a-chip, rather than the processor itself. Apple A-series chips are typically labeled on all four edges, suggesting this chipset is in a mid-production state.

TSMC is expected to be the sole supplier of Apple's faster A10 chip based on its 16nm FinFET WLP process. The new processor should bring performance improvements to the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. The smartphones are expected to be announced on September 7 and released on September 16.

Last year, TSMC-built A9 chips were found to outperform Samsung-built A9 chips in early iPhone 6s battery benchmarks, but subsequent tests showed less significant impacts that Apple later said amounted to only a 2-3% difference in "real world" battery life. Samsung is not expected to be an A10 chip supplier.

Article Link: First Photo of Apple's A10 Chip for iPhone 7 Appears With Mid-July Production Date
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"Samsung is not expected to be an a10 chip supplier"

:D
 
So disappointed they aren't counting up in hexadecimal so it'd be an AA chip! Yet more proof Apple has lost its way, missing such a great opportunity.

(;) joking!)
 
dominiongamma said:
They need a cgi of Sir Ives and his white background too ;-) so he can describe the phone for 10 mins
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I don't know man... Just cut the few bits where he talks about a specific part and you can just reuse any of those scripts.

Works with Cook's outro as well: "only Apple could do this!" etc...

And knowing they sold their billionth iPhone recently, maybe we can cut the numbers talk as well, that'd be amazing.

Glassed Silver:mac
 
dannyyankou said:
I never understood the value of seeing what the chip looks like. It looks the same as all the other ones except there's a 10 instead of 9.
Click to expand...
You clicked on the link, and then commented.
Glassed Silver said:
With all the parts leaked, maybe some animators can make the presentation video ahead of time so we don't need to watch one during the keynote and jump straight to pricing, models and the features they removed.

That way we have more time to talk about the new Mac Pro, iMac and the amazing updates to pro apps.
Ooops, sorry... wrong decade.

Glassed Silver:mac
Click to expand...
How dare you attempt to rob the world of Jony Ive's soothing voice explain to us the philosophical reason for moving the antenna lines on the new iPhone.
 
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dannyyankou said:
I never understood the value of seeing what the chip looks like. It looks the same as all the other ones except there's a 10 instead of 9.
Click to expand...
You clicked on the link, and then commented.
Glassed Silver said:
With all the parts leaked, maybe some animators can make the presentation video ahead of time so we don't need to watch one during the keynote and jump straight to pricing, models and the features they removed.

That way we have more time to talk about the new Mac Pro, iMac and the amazing updates to pro apps.
Ooops, sorry... wrong decade.

Glassed Silver:mac
Click to expand...
How dare you attempt to rob the world of Jony Ive's soothing voice explain to us the philosophical reason for moving the antenna lines on the new iPhone.
 
konqerror said:
Where are all the pins (balls)? There's way too few pins for a CPU, check out the pictures of a iPhone 6 logic board. This looks like the right amount for RAM, which makes sense since the iPhone always used package-on-package and the RAM was on top.

So this really doesn't tell you anything about the CPU. It's just RAM they stuck in a custom package.
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It is hard to say. If it is, as rumored, an integrated fan out chip there might not be that many lines going to the outside world. It really doesn't upon how many bits of functionality Apple can integrated into the package. With high enough integration they only thing they need going to the outside world would be power and interfaces which these days are all serial line based.

They talk about integrated RAM but it is also possible that stuff like flash could be integrated into the package. Of course we won't know anything unti the hardware ships and somebody tears the chips down. The thing is there is a lot of incentive to package things tighter and tighter, it just leads to better performance.

This is interesting because when Apple started soldering RAM to the motherboards of its computers people where up in arms. Me I just saw it as the next step in manufacturing which will eventually lead to RAM right in the CPU package. We are already seeing this in GPU's with AMD's HBM. I wouldn't be surprised to see Intel do something like this for the M series chips in the near future.
[doublepost=1470879119][/doublepost]
TallManNY said:
Nah. This is the point when the leaks start happening in earnest. You are going to start seeing the real stuff now. Are we at the point where there are a million fully functional iPhone 7s sitting in a warehouse somewhere in China? I'm not sure. But if we aren't there yet we are probably pretty close. Apple ships millions on launch day and it isn't like they all get manufactured the night before by Santa's elves. I don't know when FoxConn goes into full production of final form, but it has to be before September, right?
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You are right of course. Most likely pilot production has already started and chip manufacturing before that. Apple will ramp inventory for a month or more before releasing so yeah iPhones are piling up somewhere. Honestly I honestly I wouldn't be surprised to see 20 million in inventory before launch day, maybe even 30. The biggest problem for Apple isn't so much production as it is getting the right numbers for each model and configuration. It is a bit of a guessing game to know which model will be the popular color and so forth.
 
Wow that's incredible, I've not seen anything so chip like since I had fish and chips last Friday, makes me want to sprinkle salt and vinegar all over it and eat it all up!
 
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