It’s Apple’s Own Chip in the iPhone 5

According to the smart money at the Linley Group and AnandTech Apple developed the A6 ARM chip it’s using in the iPhone 5 – something it’s not talking about –and it’s probably having the widget made by Samsung on its 32nm process, which may account for why it’s 22% smaller and doubtlessly cheaper than the A5. If the dingus has 2x the performance of the A5 like Apple says it’s probably got two custom CPU cores (unless it’s three) clocking roughly 1.2GHz, less than it might to save power. Linley says a month after Apple bought low-power processor start-up PA Semi for $278 million in April of 2008 it cut a secret deal with ARM for a rare instruction set architecture license so it could develop its own ARM-compatible CPUs.

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