![]() The fact that Apple used A7 in the previous iPad Air means that on top of already being a serious step up in transistor count versus A8, compared to the iPad Air 1 the gap is even larger. Anything approaching A5X’s 165mm2 is very unlikely, especially for a 20nm product this early, but this still means that A8X is almost certainly Apple’s second largest SoC to date. Die size is a far more complex subject than just doing a linear extrapolation of transistor count – SRAM and logic have different densities, and even then different logics will pack better or worse than others – but we expect that A8X’s die size will be somewhere north of A6X’s 123mm2. Apple has stated that A8X features 3 billion transistors, versus roughly 2 billion transistors in the 89mm2 A8. The lack of a Chipworks die shot means that we can’t pin down an exact die size, but the math behind the numbers doesn’t leave too much wiggle room. Apple SoC Comparisonįirst and foremost, A8X is quite large. Unfortunately the chip disassembly and analysis experts Chipworks have not released a die shot for A8X, so we aren’t going to be able to do visual identification of the chip, but there are still quite a few aspects we can uncover from Apple’s published statements and from benchmarking. Named A8X, like Apple’s past tablet SoCs this latest SoC is designed to be a bigger and badder version of Apple’s A8 smartphone SoC, taking the A8 design and building it larger for better performance.Ī8X’s design is something we’ve spent quite some time mulling over, and while we haven’t found every answer we’d like to have, at this point we have a solid idea of what Apple has been up to. Nonetheless, in keeping with their unpredictable nature for 2014 Apple has once more changed their course and gone back to building a tablet SoC for the iPad Air 2. The iPad Air was among the most powerful tablets of 2013 (and holds up well in 2014 as well), showing that even in this highly competitive landscape Apple doesn’t necessarily need to build a dedicated tablet SoC to deliver top-notch performance. This ended up being the first time in a couple of generations that Apple didn’t mint an iPad-only SoC, and while we’ll gladly take more power, overall this seemed to work out for Apple. ![]() Most recently, for the A7 generation of products Apple opted to use the A7 SoC for both the iPhone 5S and iPad Air 1. ![]() Neither strategy is intrinsically right or wrong, but it does mean that it’s anyone’s guess what Apple will do until they announce it. ![]() In some cases Apple will use their phone SoC – which was the case as far back as the very first iPad – and in other cases they’ll produce a new SoC just for the iPad. Over the years Apple has gone back and forth on their SoC designs for the full size iPad. ![]()
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