Technology explained: here's how the A8 chip makes the Apple iPhone 6 click and tick

Although certain aspects of it are still shrouded under a bulky veil of secrecy, Apple's newly-designed 64-bit A8 SoC surely deserves some attention, as it's the heart that churns the gears of the newest iPhone duet, the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus. Being arguably the most important hardware aspect of nowadays' smartphones, a SoC might either “make or break” a given device, thus the gradual evolution of the silicon inside a smartphone is one of the more important upgrades.

Several days ago, Tim Cook took the stage and unveiled the newest iPhones, which are unsurprisingly being powered by the newest Apple SoC – the aforementioned Apple A8. It is a successor to the A7 one, which churns the gears of the iPhone 5s, whereas the latter's toned-down variation relied on the A6 chip. This year Apple has taken a tad more different approach and has equipped both of its new champions with its latest silicon. We already gave you an in-depth look of the improved display of the iPhone 6, but now we decided to take a closer look at the A8 SoC and find what makes it such a "core" aspect of Cupertino's newest products.

Apple A8's CPU and manufacturing technology

Apple and Samsung, the two mighty "frenemies", have previously collaborated on a number of iPhone devices, as the South Korean-based company has manufactured a number of processors in behalf of Cupertino, but the A8 chip has nothing to do with Sammy. Apple tried to divorce Samsung and replaced the latter with TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company), which is the manufacturer behind the A8 SoC. Well, rumor has it that Samsung might get back on the bandwagon in 2015, but it's out of the picture for now.

Although Cupertino has not disclosed any official information about the clock rate of the A8 chip, some preliminary benchmark results claim that it comes with a second generation dual-core Cyclone processor on board, probably ticking at 1.4GHz (as a comparison, the Apple A7 SoC also comes with a dual-core CPU, humming at a tad lower clock rate - 1.3GHz). Apart from the speculations, we know for sure that the processor in the A8 SoC question is once again based on the ARMv8-a architecture, which makes it a 64-bit one, just like the A7 one in the iPhone 5s.

TSMC has, in fact, produced a worthy successor to the A7, at least on paper. The Apple A8 chip is built on an “advanced 20nm process”, which means that the on-board transistors of the chip are more miniature and more densely-packed than in the A7, for example, which is based on a 28nm manufacturing process. TSMC explains that the A8 is 30% faster, 25% more energy efficient, and 1.9 times more dense than other systems-on-chip that rely on the 28nm technology. Interestingly, Samsung's direct iPhone 6 contender, the Samsung Galaxy Alpha, is equipped with a homebrewed Exynos 5430 SoC, the world's first smartphone SoC based on the 20nm process.

Apple, on the other hand, says that its A8 chip is 50% more more efficient that the previous generation, the A7. Despite being slightly smaller, the A8's processor has some two billion transistors inside, roughly two times more than the ones in A7's CPU. During the keynote on September 9, the Apple A8 SoC was lauded as being 50x faster than the one in the very first iPhone, but this comparison was a pretty long shot.