Fun fact: the A4 was not the first "Apple

June 25, 2021, 10:42 am
Fun fact: the A4 was not the first
Fun fact: the A4 was not the first "Apple in-house SoC design". That was 100% pure marketing. All of Apple`s chips are custom designs, and they`ve been slowly shifting responsibilities in-house with every new chip. A4 wasn`t special. It even still had a Samsung part number.

I would be surprised if the memory controller is first-party IP at this point since its a significant component in their unified memory play and real world performance. But many other pieces are not worth the time/effort compared to their licensing cost.

Even the original iPhone SoC was a semi-custom part. Similar to SoCs for iPods, Apple gave Samsung a spec sheet and told them to build an SoC. The result was a mess of a design with poor performance. The former Mac HW VLSI team was reformed and told to build what became H2.

Oh okay !

Would it make sense to include S5L8900/8720/8920/8922 in that table? Are they supposed to all be included under "H2"? Does available evidence suggest the 8900 was a more-or-less off-the-shelf design with some tweaks, and they got progressively more custom as time went on?

Wait, are not Apple chips manufactured by TSMC ?

Yet all Samsung chips used iPhones are fcking chipgate and full of trash . They overheat all da time compare to tame Apple had to switch to all tsmc because of that

Is the S5PC100 used in the 3gs the H2? Or did Apple make two SoCs that never made it into released products?

I mean, didn`t they keep the Samsung part number format because Samsung manufactured the chip? I think A8 was when they started shifting towards sourcing from TSMC.

List of codenames here. Notice how internally the chips are Hxx, and they had that scheme since before A4. They also kept Samsung`s part number format all the way up until A7. The M1 still has a Samsung-compatible UART identical to the iPhone 2G`s. would you say the M1 is? i`m curious how much of it is actually external IP.

 
Sponsored links