Apple A5X

Apple A5X

The A5X chip
Produced	From March 16, 2012 to October 23, 2012
Designed by	Apple Inc.
Common manufacturer(s)	Samsung Electronics
Max. CPU clock rate	1 GHz
Min. feature size	45 nm
Instruction set	ARMv7
Microarchitecture	Cortex-A9
Product code	S5L8945X
Cores	2
L1 cache	32 KB instruction + 32 KB data
L2 cache	1 MB
Predecessor	Apple A5
Successor	Apple A6X
GPU	PowerVR SGX543MP4 (quad-core)
Application	Mobile
Variant	Apple A5

The Apple A5X is a 32-bit system-on-a-chip (SoC) designed by Apple, introduced at the launch of the third generation iPad on March 7, 2012. It is a high performance variant of the Apple A5; Apple claims it has twice the graphics performance of the A5. It was superseded in the iPhone 5 and 5C by the A6 chip and the fourth generation iPad by the A6X chip.

Design

The A5X features a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore CPU at 1 GHz and a quad-core PowerVR SGX543MP4 GPU clocked at 250 MHz. Apple doubled the size of the A5X's memory interface in comparison to the A5, including a memory interface subsystem with four 32-bit wide LP-DDR2 memory controllers. This was done to provide sufficient bandwidth for the very high pixel count on the third generation iPad's Retina Display.

Unlike the A4 and A5, the A5X is covered with a metal heat spreader and is not a package-on-package (PoP) assembly. In those earlier chips the RAM sat on top of the SoC, however, in the A5X the RAM is not bundled together with the SoC, instead the A5X sits on one side of the motherboard and twin Samsung LP DDR2 SDRAM is soldered directly to the other side of the motherboard. The A5X is manufactured on a 45 nm process by Samsung. The silicon die size has increased drastically compared to the A5 at 165 mm², 3.1 times larger than the 53.3 mm² die area of the original A4.

Products that include the Apple A5X

• iPad (3rd generation) – March 2012

See also

• Apple system on chips, the series of ARM based system-on-a-chip (SoC) processors designed by Apple for their consumer electronic devices.