Designed by Apple Inc. Max. CPU clock rate to 2.34 GHz Instruction set A64, A32, T32 | Common manufacturer(s) TSMC Min. feature size 16 nm | |
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Produced From September 7, 2016 to present | ||
The Apple A10 Fusion is a 64-bit system on a chip (SoC), designed by Apple Inc. and manufactured by TSMC. It is the fastest single-threaded mobile SoC released to date, and first appeared in the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus which were introduced on September 7, 2016. The A10 is the first Apple-produced quad-core SoC, with two high-performance cores and two energy-efficient cores. Apple states that it has 40% greater CPU performance and 50% greater graphics performance compared to its predecessor, the Apple A9.
Contents
Design
The A10 with a die area of 125 mm2, 3.3 billion transistors (including the GPU and caches) – features two Apple-designed 64-bit 2.34 GHz ARMv8-A cores called Hurricane at 4.18 mm2 – is built on TSMC's 16 nm FinFET process and is called APL1W24. As the first Apple-produced quad-core SoC, those two high-performance cores designed for demanding tasks like gaming, while also having two energy-efficient cores for normal tasks in a configuration similar to the ARM big.LITTLE technology.
However, unlike most implementations of big.LITTLE, such as the Snapdragon 820 or Exynos 8890, only one core type can be active at a time. Only either the high-performance or low-power cores will be active at any given time. Thus, the A10 Fusion appears to software and benchmarks as a dual core chip. Apple claims that the high-performance cores are 40% faster than Apple's previous A9 processor and that the two high-efficiency cores consume 20% of the power of the high performance Hurricane cores; they are used when performing simple tasks, such as checking email. A new performance controller decides in realtime which pair of cores should run for a given task in order to optimize for performance or battery life. The A10 has a L1 cache of 64 KB for data and 64 KB for instructions, an L2 cache of 3 MB shared by both cores, and a 4 MB L3 cache that services the entire SoC.
The new 6-core GPU built into the A10 chip is 50% faster while consuming 66% of the power of its A9 predecessor. Further analysis has suggested that Apple has kept the GT7600 used in Apple A9, but replaced portions of the PowerVR based GPU with its own proprietary designs. These changes appear to be using lower half-precision floating points numbers, allowing for higher-performance and lower power consumption.
The A10 is packaged in a new InFO packaging from TSMC which reduces the height of the package. In the same package there are also four Samsung LPDDR4 RAM chips integrating 2 GB of RAM in the iPhone 7, or 3 GB in the iPhone 7 Plus.
The "power-efficient" cores codenamed Zephyr at 0.78 mm2, mentioned above are included in the A10 design.