Comment by ZeroGravitas
13 years ago
Up until the A5 the chips were designed and built by Samsung (from relatively standard ARM references). Apple hasn't done anything particularly exciting since.
13 years ago
Up until the A5 the chips were designed and built by Samsung (from relatively standard ARM references). Apple hasn't done anything particularly exciting since.
The A7 seems pretty exciting to people who pay attention to these things: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review
It uses ARM v8 and Samsung's 28nm process and Imagination's series 6 GPU, which is all very exciting for chip nerds, but not for Samsung, who provides one, is a leading licencee of another and could buy the third if it wants to, so what's left to steal?
"so what's left to steal?"
The CPU? ARMv8 isn't a thing, it's an instruction set specification, just like x86, implemented by various micro-architectures. Samsung doesn't do that (yet).
ARMv8 in this case is just an instruction set spec.
Apple's implementation is very much something to steal, given that it outperforms everyone else's.