While Apple hasn’t revealed many technical details about the components in the new iPhone 5, a report today says that the new A6 processor that powers the new handset’s goodness is using next-gen ARM Cortex A15 cores, making it the first to market with the technology.
According to a report by Anand Lal Shimpi of Anandtech, the performance gains Apple reported for the new A6 chip and other factors means that “it looks like Apple has integrated two ARM Cortex A15 cores on Samsung’s 32nm LP HK+MG process.”
The site added, “This is a huge deal because it means Apple beat both TI and Samsung on bringing A15s to market.”
The Cortex-A15 is a major jump for the ARM architecture, which calls the core “the highest-performance licensable processor the industry has ever seen.”
It wouldn’t be anything new for Apple to leapfrog the industry by using an advanced new processor. 2010 saw it debut the iPad with its A4, with its “FastCore” technology, a faster clocked implementation of ARM’s standard Cortex-A8 core.
The next year saw the release of the iPad 2 with the new dual core A5. Steve Jobs referred to it as the “first dual core tablet to ship in volume.”
Instead of delivering an entirely new processor core for its next iPad, Apple used the A5X, an A5 variant with quad core graphics and twice the RAM to power its new Retina Display.
Apple custom Ax chips are manufactured by Samsung, which usually produces a similar version for its own use, but with different graphics cores and other variations.