TechInsights Publishes Apple A12 Die Shot: Our Take

[harlan4096]

As is custom by now every year, we look forward to TechInsights teardown of the latest new mobile SoCs. This time around we’re delighted to see a new die shot of the new Apple A12, the first commercially available 7nm piece of silicon.

While TechInsights posted their take on the block identification and labelling, found on their iPhone XS teardown blog post, I do think it missed the mark in terms of the CPU complexes. Therefore I did my own analysis and took the liberty of adding a bit more visibility and custom labelling of the die shot.

We see two big cores in the centre-left next to what TechInsights labelled as the NPU. The cores have seen some larger restructuring and this is most obvious in the doubling of the SRAM macros of the L1 data caches which I’ve confirmed to be tested at 128KB – twice the size over last year’s 64KB of the A11 cores. We also similarly see a doubling of the L1 instruction cache macro cells – which also likely hints that this has also seen a doubling to up to 128KB.

Full reading: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13393/tec...t-our-take