Analysis by AnandTech suggests that Apple’s new A8 System on a Chip is likely equipped with an Imagination six-core PowerVR Series6XT GX6650.
Apple boasts of massive performance improvements in its latest A-series processor — up to 84x over the first-generation iPhone — and the company is thought to have achieved those gains by moving to a new 6-core GPU design alongside a slightly redesigned application processor, data suggests.
AnandTech notes that the GX6650 is the only PowerVR part that could match Apple’s claimed performance improvements, and would also support ARM’s Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression.
ASTC is a standard for texture compression that allows GPU manufacturers to make chips operate with more power efficiency, while still maintaining high levels of performance.
The application processor is thought to be running a modified version of the Cyclone architecture that was introduced with the A7 chip. AnandTech also believes that the iPhone 6 benchmarks that were leaked shortly before the handset’s debut are legitimate, putting the A8 at a clock speed of 1.4 GHz, 100 MHz faster than the A7, likely not a big enough bump to account for the A8’s much improved performance.
It is also believed that Apple has kept the A8’s RAM at 1GB, the amount of on-chip memory used ever since the introduction of the iPhone 5.
