A10 Fusion

By MacRumors Staff

'A10 Fusion' Articles

iPhone 7 Teardown Reveals 'Incredibly Thin' A10 Chip With 2GB RAM, Intel Modem

Friday September 16, 2016 6:56 am PDT by Eric Slivka
While iFixit was busy tearing down the iPhone 7 Plus, the experts at Chipworks opened up an iPhone 7 to take a close look at the chips included on the device's logic board. The new A10 Fusion chip at the heart of the iPhone 7 is the most significant feature to be examined, with Chipworks noting the chip is indeed manufactured by TSMC with a die size of roughly 125 square millimeters. The iPhone 7 is also confirmed to include 2 GB of memory, compared to the 3 GB found on the iPhone 7 Plus. The A10 is also extremely thin, due in large part to the InFO packaging technique used by TSMC which was seen as a major factor in TSMC winning exclusivity for A10 production.[W]hatever node is being used, the A10 processor is incredibly thin, giving credibility to the reports that TSMC’s InFO packaging technique is being used. The A10 sits below the Samsung K3RG1G10CM 2-GB LPDDR4 memory. This is similar to the low power mobile DRAM as the one we found in the iPhone 6s. Looking at the X-rays we see the four dies are not stacked, but are spread out across the package. This arrangement keeps the overall package height to a minimum. Assembled in a package-on-package assembly with the A10 InFO packaging technique reduces the total height of PoP significantly.On the cellular modem side, Chipworks found an Intel part that is likely the XMM7360, paired with two SMARTi 5 RF transceiver chips and a power management chip also from Intel. As we previously noted, Apple is producing two different models of both the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, with models for AT&T and T-Mobile users not
Read Full Article • 155 comments

iPhone 7 Series is Faster Than Any MacBook Air Ever Made

Thursday September 15, 2016 3:57 am PDT by Tim Hardwick
Yesterday, John Gruber at Daring Fireball highlighted just how well Apple's A10 Fusion chip found in its iPhone 7 stands up to the competition in terms of raw speed. (Image taken from Daring Fireball.) Looking at Geekbench results for single and multi-core performance across a range of smartphones, Gruber noted that the iPhone 7 series beats all newcomers on every score, including Samsung's new Galaxy S7 and Note 7 Android phones. More impressively perhaps, the A10 Fusion processor scores faster overall results than every MacBook Air Apple has ever made, only once falling behind a multi-core score recorded for the early 2015 MacBook Air, which is powered by an Intel Core i7 and scores 5650, just edging the iPhone 7's result of 5630. Still, the laptop can't keep up with the A10 chip's raw single-core performance (2989 compared to 3261). Apple's latest flagship phone also performs comparably to an early 2013 MacBook Pro, powered by an Intel Core i5. Apple has invested heavily in its Ax-series of processors, with some commentators and rumors suggesting it could eventually transition an ARM-based processor to future MacBooks. You can learn more about the technology behind Apple's A10 Fusion chip in MacRumors' dedicated article on the
Read Full Article • 111 comments

A Closer Look at Apple's CPU Improvements for iPhone 7 and Apple Watch

Monday September 12, 2016 1:10 pm PDT by Chris Jenkins
At last Wednesday's media event, Apple introduced two new processors - the A10 Fusion for iPhone 7 and 7 Plus and the S2 for Apple Watch Series 2. Although Apple only briefly covered the S2 during the presentation, it did spend a good deal of time talking about A10 Fusion. The 'Fusion' suffix refers to the heterogeneous architecture that the A10 features, which has two high-power, high-throughput cores and two much smaller cores that are more power efficient. Apple also introduced another very important piece of standalone silicon in its new AirPods, dubbed the W1 chip. In total, this represents a great deal of engineering work done by Apple over the last year, and the A10 is the most significant to Apple's system-on-a-chip (SoC) line since the company's transition to 64-bit. Apple unveiled the biggest technical changes featured in the A10 at the very beginning, boasting a four-core CPU with 3.3 billion transistors. While Apple never disclosed a transistor count for the A9, it very likely fell somewhere in the middle between the 2 billion count on the A8 and the 3.3 billion of the new A10. A transistor count well under 3 billion seems probable for the A9; otherwise it would have been worth boasting about on its own. The 3.3 billion number for the A10 is well over 50 percent larger than the A8, and the large jump is likely mostly thanks to the addition of two new, albeit small, CPU cores along with a greatly enhanced image signal processor (ISP). Apple also disclosed that the GPU remains a six-cluster design, while benchmarks suggest that the L1 and L2 cache
Read Full Article • 127 comments

A10 Fusion Chip in iPhone 7 Plus Outperforms iPad Pro's A9X in Benchmark Tests

Thursday September 8, 2016 11:20 am PDT by Juli Clover
What appears to be a legitimate benchmark of an iPhone 7 Plus with an A10 Fusion processor has been spotted on Geekbench, and its performance scores are impressive. The A10 Fusion in the iPhone 7 Plus outperforms all existing iOS devices equipped with A9 and A9X processors, including the iPhone 6s, the iPhone SE, and the 9.7 and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models. The iPhone 7 Plus received a single-core score of 3233 and a multi-core score of 5363. Comparatively, the iPhone 6s Plus averages a single-core score of 2407 and a multi-core score of 4046, while the 12.9-inch iPad Pro, which has the highest-clocked A9X chip, has an average single-core score of 3009 and an average multi-core score of 4881. The iPhone 7 Plus is approximately 33 percent faster than the iPhone 6s when it comes to both single and multi-core scores, and approximately 7 percent faster than the 12.9-inch iPad Pro on single-core tests and nearly 10 percent faster on multi-core tests. Apple's A10 chip is running at 2.23 GHz, which is potentially under-clocked because rumors suggested it would be capable of running at 2.4 to 2.45GHz. The A9X in the 12.9-inch iPad Pro runs at 2.2GHz, while the A9 in the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus runs at 1.8GHz. In marketing materials, Apple says the A10 Fusion chip is the most powerful chip ever in a smartphone, running two times faster than the iPhone 6 with graphics performance that's up to three times faster. In Geekbench tests, the iPhone 7 Plus did indeed double the performance of the iPhone 6 Plus on both multi and single-core tests. The A10 Fusion built into
Read Full Article • 135 comments

Apple Has Filed Trademarks for 'A10 Fusion' and 'iSight Duo'

Wednesday September 7, 2016 7:19 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
Just hours after lawyer Brian Conroy unearthed several Apple trademark filings, including iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, Iris Engine, AirPod Case, Touch Bar, Smart Button, Control Strip, and more, MacRumors reader Ryan Simmons has uncovered additional trademark applications for "A10 Fusion" and "iSight Duo" filed in Brunei. "iSight Duo" would be a logical name for the iPhone 7 Plus' widely rumored dual-lens camera system, but what "A10 Fusion" could represent is less clear. Both the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are expected to have faster A10 chips, while Apple's only use of "Fusion" is for the Fusion Drive, which combines flash (SSD) and hard drive (HDD) storage into a single volume on select iMac and Mac mini models. Both trademark applications were filed on June 8, 2016, while Simmons also uncovered recent trademark filings for "Depth" and "Writeboard," which could be features or functions related to the Apple Pencil. Assuming the "iSight Duo" dual-camera system has one telephoto lens, as rumored, "Depth" could alternatively pertain to depth of field photos on iPhone 7 Plus. It is likely that Apple's announcements at its iPhone event in San Francisco today will shed light on at least some of the trademark filings uncovered over the past two days. The keynote begins at 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time, and MacRumors will be providing live coverage of the
Read Full Article • 144 comments