Apple A10

Apple A10 Fusion
Produced From September 7, 2016 to present
Designed by Apple Inc.
Common manufacturer(s)
Max. CPU clock rate to 2.34 GHz[2]
Min. feature size 16 nm
Instruction set A64, A32, T32
Microarchitecture Hurricane and Zephyr both ARMv8‑A-compatible
Cores 2× Hurricane + 2× Zephyr
Predecessor Apple A9, Apple A9X
GPU 6-core
Application Mobile

The Apple A10 Fusion is a 64-bit system on a chip (SoC), designed by Apple Inc. and manufactured by TSMC. It is the fastest single-threaded mobile SoC released to date,[3][4] and first appeared in the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus which were introduced on September 7, 2016.[5][6] The A10 is the first Apple-produced quad-core SoC, with two high-performance cores and two energy-efficient cores. Apple states that it has 40% greater CPU performance and 50% greater graphics performance compared to its predecessor, the Apple A9.

Design

The A10 with a die area of 125 mm2, 3.3 billion transistors (including the GPU and caches) – features two Apple-designed 64-bit 2.34 GHz ARMv8-A cores called Hurricane at 4.18 mm2 – is built on TSMC's 16 nm FinFET process[7][8] and is called APL1W24. As the first Apple-produced quad-core SoC, those two high-performance cores designed for demanding tasks like gaming, while also having two energy-efficient cores for normal tasks in a configuration similar to the ARM big.LITTLE technology.[4][9]

However, unlike most implementations of big.LITTLE, such as the Snapdragon 820 or Exynos 8890, only one core type can be active at a time. Only either the high-performance or low-power cores will be active at any given time. Thus, the A10 Fusion appears to software and benchmarks as a dual core chip. Apple claims that the high-performance cores are 40% faster than Apple's previous A9 processor and that the two high-efficiency cores consume 20% of the power of the high performance Hurricane cores;[10] they are used when performing simple tasks, such as checking email. A new performance controller decides in realtime which pair of cores should run for a given task in order to optimize for performance or battery life. The A10 has a L1 cache of 64 KB for data and 64 KB for instructions, an L2 cache of 3 MB shared by both cores, and a 4 MB L3 cache that services the entire SoC.

The new 6-core GPU built into the A10 chip is 50% faster while consuming 66% of the power of its A9 predecessor. Further analysis has suggested that Apple has replaced portions of the PowerVR based GPU with its own proprietary designs.[11][12] These changes appear to be using lower half-precision floating points numbers, allowing for higher-performance and lower power consumption.

The A10 is packaged in a new InFO packaging from TSMC which reduces the height of the package. In the same package there are also four Samsung LPDDR4 RAM chips integrating 2 GB of RAM in the iPhone 7, or 3 GB in the iPhone 7 Plus.

The "power-efficient cores codenamed" Zephyr at 0.78 mm2,[13][14] mentioned above are included in the A10 design.

Products that include the Apple A10 Fusion

See also

References

  1. ↑ https://www.chipworks.com/about-chipworks/overview/blog/apple-iphone-7-teardown
  2. ↑ Cunningham, Andrew (September 13, 2016). "iPhone 7 and 7 Plus review: Great annual upgrades with one major catch". Ars Technica. Retrieved September 14, 2016.
  3. ↑ Peak, Sebastian (October 11, 2016). "Apple iPhone 7 and 7 Plus Review: More and Less". PC Perspective. Retrieved October 14, 2016.
  4. 1 2 "The Apple iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus Review". AnandTech. Retrieved October 11, 2016.
  5. ↑ Apple Debuts Three Custom Chips
  6. ↑ Apple Announces iPhone 7 & iPhone 7 Plus: A10 Fusion SoC, New Camera, Wide Color Gamut, Preorders Start Sept. 9th
  7. ↑ Apple iPhone 7 Teardown
  8. ↑ Smith, Ryan (September 16, 2016). "Early iPhone 7 Teardowns: Intel and Qualcom Modems, TSMC SoC, and 2 to 3 GB of RAM". Anandtech. Retrieved September 16, 2016.
  9. ↑ "Apple A10 Fusion". TechCrunch. Retrieved September 7, 2016.
  10. ↑ Kingsley-Hughes, Adrian (September 8, 2016). "A10 Fusion: The silicon powering Apple's new iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus: The A10 Fusion doesn't offer as big a jump in performance as last year's A9, but it's still an impressive piece of silicon.".
  11. ↑ Kanter, David (25 October 2016). "A Look Inside Apple's Custom GPU for the iPhone". Real World Tech. Retrieved 23 November 2016.
  12. ↑ Manion, Wayne (31 October 2016). "Real World Technologies dissects Apple's A10 GPU". TechReport.com. Retrieved 23 November 2016.
  13. ↑ "Apple A10 Fusion Are Bigger Than the Competition – Apple Designing Bigger Cores for Better Performance?". Oct 22, 2016.
  14. ↑ Ray, Tiernan (October 21, 2016). "Apple's 'A10′ iPhone Chip Smokes the Competition, Says Linley Group". Tech Trader Daily. The Linley Group notes Apple’s “A10″ CPU cores, Hurricane and Zephyr, are quite a bit bigger than those of competing mobile chips.
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