Apple's new A6 iPhone 5 appears to be first ARM Cortex A15 phone
Apple announced its 6th generation iPhone, the iPhone 5, at a special event in San Francisco this morning. The iPhone 5 brings a huge list of improvements. Apple unexpectedly used the iPhone 5 to introduce its next-generation SoC: the A6.
Apple didn't say anything about core counts and clock speeds, but it did give us a good indication of performance: 2x faster CPU and GPU. Based on the performance gains, Apple's history of SoC naming and some other stuff we've heard recently, it looks like Apple has integrated two ARM Cortex A15 cores on Samsung's 32nm LP HK+MG process. This is a huge deal because it means Apple beat both TI and Samsung on bringing A15s to market.
The GPU side isn't entirely clear at this point, but the 2x gains could be had through a move to 4 PowerVR SGX543 cores up from 2 in the iPhone 4S. The new SoC is paired with Qualcomm's single-chip 28nm MDM9615 LTE baseband. Apple claims support for EDGE, EV-DO, HSPA, HSPA+, DC-HSDPA and LTE. The WiFi gets updated to dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz 802.11a/b/g/n, using 20MHz channels Apple can hit a peak link rate of 150Mbps over WiFi.
