Let’s take a minute here to talk about the new Applications Processor Core. Apple has chosen to go from the ARM 11 Samsung S3C6400 to the ARM A8 Samsung S5PC100 with this device.



iPhone 3Gs Block Diagram - In Progress



This is the single largest difference between the 3G and the 3Gs. Firstly the manufacturing process has been chopped from 90nm to 65nm. Pipeline depth has been boosted to 13 – stage from 8. More importantly the clock speed of this newer processor rolls in at 600MHz – opposed to the 412MHz core of the old – obsolete 3G. Samsung has also doubled the quantity of L1 cache from 16 to 32KB.

None of this even takes the new PowerVR graphics core into consideration. Apple is clearly thinking along the lines of a gaming device for this puppy. The SGX is fully programmable – like the graphics card on your PC or mac. Expect some sweet gaming action in the near future.

@ 200MHz the SGX can pop 7M triangles/second and render 250M pixels/sec. That’s roughly 7 times the performance of the old, “obsolete” MBX.

It’s kind of like comparing your old 486 to a Pentium.





Moving around the rest of the PCB – it’s easy to notice the similarities with the previous 3G device. The Power Amp wins once again went to Triquint and Skyworks. We also see the NAND flash going to Toshiba – which as far as phoneWreck is concerned is fairly surprising. The battery has been bumped from the previous 1150mAH to 1219mAH – a much needed upgrade. Only time will tell if Apple’s claim of increased battery life will hold.

Once again the psuedo SRAM win goes to Numonyx. The BaseBand Processor appears to have similar markings to the previous 3G therefore we can assume it’s an Infineon. This has been paired with the Infineon PMIC. The Applications Processor mentioned Earlier (Samsung S5PC100) is paired with a PMIC courtesy of what appears to be NXP. It’s mounted with a DDR SDRAM coming in at 256MB.

True to form, Apple has re-branded some of the higher profile IC’s we’re very interested in. We’ll be performing some more thorough analysis further identify these. Make sure to follow Dr.Wreck’s twitter or subscribe to the RSS for updates!



Underneath the logic board we have a little surprise! A new combo chip from Broadcom (BCM4325) This puppy packs 802.11a/b/g and Bluetooth 2.1 (+EDR and FM). This is a fairly substantial change from the Marvel and CSR combo on the old – obsolete 3G.

We’ve received some rumours and speculation about the other devices we weren’t able to ID. There is a guess from a few readers that the GPS chip may be the same as on the previous 3G – the Infinieon Hammerhead II. This may be true but the new package is a different size – this means that it could incorporate the compass hardware as well.

That said, we’ve had some rumours that the compass chip is the Asahi Kasei – AK8973. We’ll still have to do some more digging!



We’re currently in the process of performing a much more thorough analysis. Keep checking back for more details as they come – we’ll most likely be putting this device through it’s paces to see how it stacks up with the Palm Pre and BlackBerry Bold & Storm.

Thanks again to the wonderful people at ifixit for gracing us with these great photos! If you want to see how it’s taken apart, make sure to check out their teardown.

Stay tuned and keep wrecking!

Dr.Wreck

iphone - http://www.anandtech.com/gadgets/showdoc.aspx?i=3579&p=2

Enter the ARM Cortex A8
This past weekend Palm introduced its highly anticipated Pre. While I’m still working on my review of the Pre, I can say that it’s the closest thing to an iPhone since Apple first unveiled the product two summers ago. In many ways the Pre is lacking in areas that the iPhone has honestly perfected, but in others the Pre easily surpasses Apple’s best.

One such area is raw performance. While both the iPhone and iPhone 3G use the same old CPU/GPU, the Pre uses TI’s OMAP 3430 processor. The 3430, like the SoC Apple uses, has both a CPU and GPU on the same package. Instead of the ARM11 and the PowerVR MBX-Lite however, the OMAP 3430 uses an ARM Cortex A8 core and a PowerVR SGX GPU. Both are significant improvements over what was in the original iPhone.

Thankfully, Apple fans don’t have to be outclassed for long - the newly announced iPhone 3GS uses a comparable CPU/GPU pair.

Although unannounced, the iPhone 3GS uses (again) a Samsung SoC but this time instead of the ARM11 + MBX-Lite combo it’s got a Cortex A8 and PowerVR SGX; just like the Pre.


A derivative of this is what you'll find in the iPhone 3GS

If the ARM11 is like a modern day 486 with a very high clock speed, the Cortex A8 is like a modern day Pentium. The A8 lengthens the integer pipeline to 13 stages, enabling its 600MHz clock speed (what I’m hearing the 3GS runs at). The Cortex A8 also widens the processor; the chip is now a two-issue in-order core, capable of fetching, decoding and executing two RISC instructions in parallel.

The ARM11 processor in the iPhone/iPhone 3G has a basic vector floating point unit, but the A8 adds a much more advanced SIMD engine called NEON. The A8 also has twice as many double precision FP registers as the ARM11. The addition of NEON and the improved vector FPU in the A8 makes the processor much less like the original Pentium and much more like Intel’s Atom. Granted, Atom is significantly faster than the A8, but it also draws much more power.

Caches also get a significant improvement. I believe Apple will be using a derivative of Samsung’s S5PC100, which has a 32KB/32KB L1 cache (I/D, we may see a 16KB/16KB config instead) and a 256KB L2 cache. The L2 cache, as you’ll remember from the first section, is a new addition to the A8; the ARM11 core didn’t have an L2.

iPhone 3G (ARM11) iPhone 3GS (ARM Cortex A8)
Manufacturing Process 90nm 65nm
Architecture In-Order In-Order
Issue Width 1-issue 2-issue
Pipeline Depth 8-stage 13-stage
Clock Speed 412MHz 600MHz
L1 Cache Size 16KB I-Cache + 16KB D-Cache 32KB I-Cache + 32KB D-Cache
L2 Cache Size N/A 256KB



The combination of higher clock speeds, more cache and a dual-issue front end results in a much faster processor. Apple claims the real world performance of the iPhone 3GS can be up to 2x faster than the iPhone 3G, and I believe that’s quite feasible.



The new SoC is built on a 65nm manufacturing process, down from 90nm in the original hardware. However, power consumption should still be higher for the new SoC compared to the old one. ARM’s own site lists ~0.25mW per MHz for the ARM11 core but < 0.59mW per MHz for the A8. That’s for a 650MHz low power A8 core and I’m expecting 600MHz for the 3GS, that’s at most 3x the power consumption of the CPU in the original iPhone. So how can Apple promise better battery life?

The thing about these comparisons is that they don’t show the full picture. With the same battery capacity, running at full speed, the new iPhone 3GS would run out of juice faster than the existing iPhone 3G. But that’s rarely how people use their phones. Chances are that you’ll perform a few tasks before putting the phone back to sleep, and what matters then is how quickly you can complete those tasks.

Just under nine years ago Intel talked about a technology called Quick Start. Let me quote from our IDF 2000 Day 2 coverage (wow, that was a while ago):

“"Intel has figured out that it is best to use full CPU power for a split second to finish a task and then put the CPU to idle as this conserves battery life the best. Although one may suspect that when running complex operations the CPU would not have time to go idle, this is not the case. To illustrate this point, Intel used an example of DVD playback. Very stressful on the system as a whole, Intel's quick start technology allows the CPU to "hurry up" and perform the DVD decoding operations and then go idle until the frame is displayed to screen and the next scene needs to be calculated. This saves battery life because, although the system may require 3 watts or so to "hurry up", the power consumption goes down near .25 watts when idle. By averaging these two numbers, one can quickly see how quick start can extend battery life."”

The A8’s power consumption has to be well under that 3x max I quoted above, and the iPhone 3GS needs to be more than just 2x faster at executing instructions, but if possible then it’s quite feasible for the faster A8 to draw more instantaneous power but draw less power on average than the ARM11 core in the original iPhone.

iPhone Hardware

The iPhone's Motherboard(s) The motherboard in the iPhone is very compact; it is actually composed of two separate PCBs that are sandwiched together.





The upper left hand corner of the picture is the PCB sandwich that makes the iPhone tick; the black slot you're seeing here is for the SIM card; the cable port on the lower left of the motherboard appears to be the LCD interface. The topmost PCB appears to have the 802.11b/g wireless controller as well as most of the other microprocessors necessary for the cell phone aspects of the iPhone:





Note that we've removed the EMI shield from the top of this PCB layer in order to show off the individual components.





The lower PCB layer features the 4GB MLC NAND Flash (made by Samsung), as well as the iPhone's main processor. Two of the chips on this board have Apple logos on them, the larger of the two appears to be the iPhone's ARM processor manufactured by Samsung.





We suspect that it may be Samsung's S3C6400 based on the ARM1176 core, however some readers have written us stating that it's more likely to be the S3C2460; judging by the model numbers on the chip itself, the ARM processor may be a part of a multi-chip package that includes 1Gbit of system memory, for running the iPhone's OS. The K4X1G153PC-XGC3 is a Samsung part number, indicating a 1Gbit memory device, but it is placed on the same package as the ARM processor itself.