Designed by Apple Inc. Max. CPU clock rate 1 GHz Instruction set ARMv7 | Common manufacturer(s) Samsung Electronics Min. feature size 45 nm | |
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Produced From March 16, 2012 to October 23, 2012 | ||
The Apple A5X is a 32-bit system-on-a-chip (SoC) designed by Apple Inc., introduced at the launch of the third generation iPad on March 7, 2012. It is a high performance variant of the Apple A5; Apple claims it has twice the graphics performance of the A5. It was superseded in the iPhone 5 and 5C by the A6 chip and the fourth generation iPad by the A6X chip.
Contents
Design
The A5X features a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU at 1 GHz and a quad-core PowerVR SGX543MP4 GPU clocked at 250 MHz. Apple doubled the size of the A5X's memory interface in comparison to the A5, including a memory interface subsystem with four 32-bit wide LP-DDR2 memory controllers. This was done to provide sufficient bandwidth for the very high pixel count on the third generation iPad's Retina Display.
Unlike the A4 and A5, the A5X is covered with a metal heat spreader and is not a package-on-package (PoP) assembly. In those earlier chips the RAM sat on top of the SoC, however, in the A5X the RAM is not bundled together with the SoC, instead the A5X sits on one side of the motherboard and twin Samsung LP DDR2 SDRAM is soldered directly to the other side of the motherboard. The A5X is manufactured on a 45 nm process by Samsung. The silicon die size has increased drastically compared to the A5 at 165 mm2, 3.1 times larger than the 53.3 mm2 die area of the original A4.