Comment by w0utert

>> Unless you work at Apple in silicon design, you don't know that, and to be fair neither do I. But history has shown that every A# release gets greeted with incredible fanfare about the completely-custom CPU work at Apple, to later quietly get corrected when it turns out that it is at most a marginally derived ARM core.

His hasn't been true since the A6, which (amongst others) chipworks confirmed is a full custom design, manually laid out even, which proves it is not a modified reference ARM design. I don't think Apple would invest hundreds of millions acquiring chip design shops, gradually move from increasingly customized reference designs to full custom designs, to throw their brand new Swift core out after one generation and start over with a reference design. So I think it's pretty safe to assume the A7 is a pimped up A6 that implements armv8.

I'm not sure why you're so skeptical about Apple designing their own ARM cores, they've been going further down this path since after acquiring Intrinsity and PA-Semi, and they are not the only ones doing this, Qualcomm, nvidia and previously TI also design full custom ARM cores.