One key difference between smartphones running Android and the Apple iPhone is that the former depends on processors from the likes of Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, or NVIDIA, while the latter builds their processors in-house. Now this wasn’t always the case. The first few iPhones used off the shelf chips designed and manufactured by
Samsung, but starting with the iPhone 4S, which has the A5 chip inside, things began to change. When the folks at
EE|Times took a look at the die plan (think of it like the blueprint) of the A5, they couldn’t figure out why it was so damn big. Compared to the A4 chip that’s in the
iPhone 4, the A5 is 230% larger, despite being built using the same 45 nanometer process. Now the dual core processor and new graphics processor obviously contributed to that size increase, but
EE|Times was still left dumbfounded and came to the conclusion that Apple must be incorporating other processors on there in order to differentiate themselves from the competition.
One such processor is from a company called Audience. They make phones “hear” better by mimicking how the human ear recognizes sound. The
iPhone 4 had an Audience chip soldered on the logic board, but with the iPhone 4S Apple decided to put that processor directly on their own A5 chip. This isn’t a rumor either, it’s straight out of Audience’s S-1 filing, which was dissected by the guys at
C|Net. What does this mean exactly? While the A4 was tame, being nothing more than a rebranded Samsung chip, the A5 shows that Apple is open to building custom solutions to best fit their needs. All eyes will be on the A6 chip that’ll no doubt show up in the next generation
iPad.
What sort of third party processors will Apple put on that thing? We can’t wait to see!
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