Apple A10

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Apple A10 Fusion
Apple A10 Fusion APL1W24.jpg
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 ARMv8-A-compatible and Zephyr ARMv8-A-compatible
Cores 2 x Hurricane + 2 x 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 features an Apple-designed 64-bit 2.34 GHz ARMv8-A CPU called Hurricane, with a die area of 125 mm2, 3.3 billion transistors, and is built on TSMC's 16 nm FinFET process[7][8] and is called APL1W24. As the first Apple-produced quad-core SoC, it has two high-performance cores for demanding tasks like gaming, along with 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 like the Snapdragon 820 or Exynos 8890, the A10 Fusion is not a heterogeneous design. Either the high-performance or low-power cores will be active at any given time, but the cores can never be all active at once. 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[citation needed] shared by both cores, and a 4 MB[citation needed] 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. 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.

Products that include the Apple A10 Fusion

See also

References

  1. https://www.chipworks.com/about-chipworks/overview/blog/apple-iphone-7-teardown
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  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
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  10. [1]