Ondrej Holzman For the large iPad Pro, Apple engineers have prepared the most powerful processor they have ever designed for their mobile devices. For example, the A9X chip has twice the graphics performance of iPhone 6S with A9 processors, thanks to a custom-made graphics processor.
Technicians from chipworks and together with experts from AnandTech they came to several interesting findings.
The most important is probably the shape of the graphics processor. This is a 12-core PowerVR Series7XT from Imagination Technologies, who don't normally offer such a design. These are usually GPUs with 2, 4, 6, 8, or 16 clusters, but the design is easily scalable, and Apple is such a big customer that it can demand more from its suppliers than others get. As just a slightly different form of GPU, which uses a 128-bit memory bus in the iPad Pro.
The iPhone 6S and 6S Plus for comparison use a 6-core version of the same GPU, which is half as slow in terms of graphics performance. According to findings chipworks however, the A9X is manufactured by TSMC, as with the A9, but shared with Samsung. The same division is not confirmed for the A9X, but since Apple needs significantly less of these chips, perhaps more suppliers are not needed.
The A9X also differs in that it does not have a buffering L3 cache, which has appeared in the A9, A8 and A7 chips so far. According to AnandTech could Apple replace this absence with a larger L2 cache, faster LPDDR4 memory and a wider 128-bit memory bus, and data transmission would even be twice as fast as with the A9.
the processor caught up with the desktop i3 quite well and not overclocked.
Just as Apple switched from Power processors to Intel, it will also switch to ARM. Just as they kept OSX secret that it runs on Intel, they certainly have everything set up on ARM as well. He just hasn't reached the right time yet. One day they will announce it and do well. I don't accept the discussion that it will be a problem with applications, etc., they claimed the same when switching to PowerPC, the same to Intel, it was enough to give Rozet and everything was OK. So, so.