It’s not altogether surprising since Samsung also made the A5 chip for the iPhone 4S. But in the current polarised climate of the Apple-Samsung Wars, it’s worth remembering that the show goes on and the new iPhone 5’s brain is made by Samsung too.
iFixit put the chip under an electron microscope and took some neat images of the processor.
The A6 is labelled APL0589B01 and is manufactured by Samsung in its 32nm CMOS process factory. It measures 9.7mm x 9.97mm. Designed entirely by Apple, it has dual ARM cores and three PowerVR graphic cores. iFixit says that the ARM core blocks were laid out manually by hand.
A manual layout will usually result in faster processing speeds, but it is much more expensive and time consuming. The manual layout of the ARM processors lends much credence to the rumour that Apple designed a custom processor of the same calibre as the all-new Cortex-A15, and it just might be the only manual layout in a chip to hit the market in several years.
And now feast your eyes on all this silicon porn:
According to iFixit, this is the A6’s 1GB LP DDR2 SDRAM, manufactured by Elpida and also used in the Motorola RAZR Maxx. [iFixit]