apple a7

The A7 sports the same number of execution ports as Intel's Ivy Bridge chips and a reorder buffer equal to that found in the Haswell architecture, according to Anand Shimpi of AnandTech. Shimpi arrived at his conclusions by studying the A7 itself as well as Apple code commitments to the LLVM compiler project.

"Apple didn't build a Krait/Silvermont competitor, it built something much closer to Intel's big cores," Shimpi wrote, referring to Intel and Qualcomm's ultra-mobile CPU designs. "At the launch of the iPhone 5s, Apple referred to the A7 as being "desktop class" - it turns out that wasn't an exaggeration."

The number of execution ports is important because it defines how many instructions the processor can handle concurrently. Apple's A7 can process six instructions per clock cycle, the same as Intel's Ivy Bridge chips found in previous-generation Apple laptops and twice the capacity of the A6.

Similarly, a larger reorder buffer gives the processor a bigger pool of instructions to choose from when deciding how to most efficiently complete its tasks. The A7's 192-instruction buffer matches Intel's Haswell designs and is more than four times the A6's 45-instruction buffer.

There are other unique features inside the Apple A7 too. The A7 has an independent image processor. This image processor is a specialised digital signal processor used for processing images: recording colour, reducing noise and image sharpening. The independent image processor enables iOS devices to perform image processing with less distraction on the main ARM-v8-A CPU.

The new A7 also features a new area that Apple referred to as the Secure Enclave. This stores and protects the information on your fingerprint used by Touch ID.

Finally, there is the new Apple M7 coprocessor, which sits apart from the A7 chip and interacts with the sensors used by the iPhone (accelerometer, gyroscope and compass). Again, this frees up processing space on the ARM-v8-A CPU and also adds to the battery life of the iPhone.Now that we have more inside details on Apple's A7 processor we can answer why the Apple A7 chipset is considerably faster than its rivals; what we can't answer is why Apple placed such a powerful system inside the current iPhone and iPad range. It appears that the A7 is not being used to anywhere near its full potential at the moment.

One slight oddity of the Apple A7 processor is that it appears too fast for the iPhone and iPad Air devices at the moment. There are very few applications that truly take full advantage of the power provided by the Apple A7 processor. Apple itself has not produced first-party apps that truly use all the power of the Apple A7 processor, although this could be because running it at full tilt uses too much power. It's also an oddity to have a 64-bit processor paired with a device featuring 1GB of RAM (one of the key advantages of 64-bit processing is the ability to access a block of RAM larger than 8GB).It may be that Apple is future-proofing its internal components to have a technical edge on its competitors down the line, when the kind of performance offered by the Apple A7 is commonplace across mobile devices. It may be that the Apple A7 hints at Apple developing a SoC to replace the Intel processors used in its Mac OS X range of computers with ARM chipsets (it would not be the first time that rumour has done the rounds). It may be that Apple has a software feature in mind; one that requires short bursts of extremely high processing power. What that is, we can only speculate (although Siri offline functionality would be a good guess).

"Cyclone is incredibly forward-looking," says Shimpi. "It's very likely that you'll run into memory limits before you hit CPU performance limits if you plan on keeping your device for a long time."