What would you do if you got your hands on an iPhone 7? Folks at Chipworks think that the best thing to do with the device is open it up and take a peek inside. The teardown, however, revealed a lot of interesting information about Apple’s latest flagship smartphone.
Under the hood, the new A10 chipset is by far the most interesting piece of hardware. According to Chipworks, the chip has been developed by TSMC with a die size of roughly 125 square millimeters. The chipsets on the iPhone 6s, the A9s, were supplied by both TSMC and Samsung. It’s not clear if Samsung is also making A10s for Apple, but we’ll keep you posted on that.
The fascinating fact about the A10 is that the chip is unbelievably thin. Apparently, TSMC’s InFO packaging technique has been employed to achieve this. Additionally, the four dies within the chipset are spread out across the package instead of being stacked to keep the thickness to a minimum. And yeah, 2 GB of RAM on the new iPhone 7 has also been confirmed.
Moving on to the connectivity bit of the new iPhone, Intel’s Baseband Processor (Modem) PMB9943 has been used. This could just be the long rumoured Intel XMM7360 modem.
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We already know that the Apple iPhone 7 and the 7 Plus will be coming in two different models, with models for AT&T and T-Mobile users not including support for CDMA networks. This is because of a modem supplier split between Intel and Qualcomm, with Intel’s current chips unable to support CDMA networks due to licensing issues. iPhone 7 and 7 Plus models with Qualcomm modems will support both GSM and CDMA networks.
What’s more is that the flash memory on the iPhone 7 is also being at least dual-sourced. Chipworks notes that the two units it tore down were supplied by Hynix and Toshiba.
If you want to know what else makes the iPhone 7 the iPhone 7, head right here.
