The Cortex-A8 core used in the A4, dubbed ' Hummingbird', is thought to use performance improvements developed by Samsung in collaboration with chip designer Intrinsity, which was subsequently acquired by Apple It can run at far higher clock rates than other Cortex-A8 designs yet remains fully compatible with the design provided by ARM. The A4 commercially debuted in 2010, in Apple's iPad tablet, and was later used in the iPhone 4 smartphone, the fourth-generation iPod Touch, and the 2nd-generation Apple TV. It combines an ARM Cortex-A8 CPU – also used in Samsung's S5PC110A01 SoC – and a PowerVR SGX 535 graphics processor (GPU), all built on Samsung's 45-nanometer silicon chip fabrication process. The Apple A4 is a PoP SoC manufactured by Samsung, the first SoC Apple designed in-house. They integrate one or more ARM-based processing cores ( CPU), a graphics processing unit ( GPU), cache memory and other electronics necessary to provide mobile computing functions within a single physical package. 'A' series chips were also used in the discontinued iPod Touch line and the original HomePod. The 'A' series is a family of SoCs used in the iPhone, certain iPad models, and the Apple TV. Manufacturing of the chips is outsourced to semiconductor contract manufacturers such as Samsung and TSMC.Ī series Evolution of Apple 'A' series Johny Srouji is in charge of Apple's silicon design. Īpple fully controls the integration of Apple silicon chips with the company's hardware and software products. As of January 2023, all newer Mac models are built with Apple silicon only the older model Mac Pro still uses Xeon processors. The first Macs built with the Apple M1 processor were unveiled on November 10, 2020.

It is the basis of most new Mac computers as well as iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Apple TV, and Apple Watch, and of products such as AirPods, HomePod, HomePod Mini, and AirTag.Īpple announced its plan to switch Mac computers from Intel processors to Apple silicon at WWDC 2020 on June 22, 2020. Apple silicon is a series of system on a chip (SoC) and system in a package (SiP) processors designed by Apple Inc., mainly using the ARM architecture.

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