A6

The Apple A6 is a system on a chip (SoC) designed by Apple Inc. that drives the iPhone 5 which was introduced on September 12, 2012. Apple claims that it is twice as fast and has twice the graphics power compared to its predecessor the Apple A5. The A6 is said to use a 1.3 GHz custom Apple-designed ARMv7 based dual-core CPU,[6] called Swift, rather than a licensed CPU from ARM like in previous designs, and an integrated triple-core PowerVR SGX 543MP3 graphics processing unit (GPU) with the same performance as the previous Apple A5X processor found in the third-generation iPad. The SGX 543MP3 is running at 266 MHz. The A6 chip also has 1GB of LPDDR2 SDRAM made by Elpida. Compared to the iPhone 4S, which had only 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM. Manufactured by Samsung on a High-κ metal gate (HKMG) 32 nm process, the chip is 96.71 mm2 large which is 22% smaller than the A5 and it consumes less power than its predecessor. Information is scarce but the Swift core uses a new tweaked instruction set, ARMv7s, featuring some elements of the ARM Cortex-A15 such as support for the Advanced SIMD v2, and VFPv4. Analysis suggests that the Swift core has a triple-wide frontend and two FPUs, compared to a two-wide core with a single FPU in the Cortex-A9 based predecessor. A version of the A6 with higher frequency and four graphic cores is called Apple A6X and is found in the fourth generation iPad.