Apple A9
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The Apple A9 is a
64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit CPUs and ALUs are those that are based on processor registers, address buses, or data buses of that size. A ...
ARM-based
system-on-chip A system on a chip or system-on-chip (SoC ; pl. ''SoCs'' ) is an integrated circuit that integrates most or all components of a computer or other electronic system. These components almost always include a central processing unit (CPU), memor ...
(SoC), designed by
Apple Inc Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company ...
. Manufactured for Apple by both
TSMC Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC; also called Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is the world's most valuable semiconductor company, the world' ...
and
Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...
, it first appeared in the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus which were introduced on September 9, 2015. Apple states that it has 70% more CPU performance and 90% more graphics performance compared to its predecessor, the
Apple A8 The Apple A8 is a 64-bit ARM-based system on a chip (SoC) designed by Apple Inc. It first appeared in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, which were introduced on September 9, 2014. Apple states that it has 25% more CPU performance and 50% more gra ...
. On September 12, 2018, the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus along with the first-generation iPhone SE was discontinued, ending production of A9 chips. The latest software updates for the iPhone 6S & 6S Plus including the iPhone SE 1st generation variants systems using this chip are iOS 15.7.1, released on October 27, 2022 as they were discontinued with the release of
iOS 16 iOS 16 is the 16th and current major release of the iOS mobile operating system developed by Apple for its iPhone line of products. It was announced at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 6, 2022, as the successor to ...
in 2022, while updates for the
iPad (5th generation) The iPad 9.7-inch (officially iPad (5th generation)) is a tablet computer designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. After its announcement on March 21, 2017, conflicting naming conventions spawned a number of different names, including ...
variants systems using this chip are still supported.


Design

The A9 features an Apple-designed 64-bit 1.85 GHz ARMv8-A dual-core CPU called Twister. The A9 in the iPhone 6S has 2 GB of
LPDDR4 Low-Power Double Data Rate (LPDDR), also known as LPDDR SDRAM, is a type of synchronous dynamic random-access memory that consumes less power and is targeted for mobile computers and devices such as mobile phones. Older variants are also known ...
RAM included in the package. The A9 has a per-core
L1 cache A CPU cache is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost (time or energy) to access data from the main memory. A cache is a smaller, faster memory, located closer to a processor core, whic ...
of 64 KB for data and 64 KB for instructions, an
L2 cache A CPU cache is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost (time or energy) to access data from the main memory. A cache is a smaller, faster memory, located closer to a processor core, whic ...
of 3 MB shared by both CPU cores, and a 4 MB L3 cache that services the entire SoC and acts as a
victim cache A victim cache is a small, usually fully associative cache placed in the refill path of a CPU cache that stores all the blocks evicted from that level of cache, originally proposed in 1990. In modern architectures, this function is typically perfor ...
. The A9 also features a custom PowerVR Series7XT @ 650 MHz GPU, featuring 6x custom shader cores and compiler from Apple. The A9 includes a new
image processor An image processor, also known as an image processing engine, image processing unit (IPU), or image signal processor (ISP), is a type of media processor or specialized digital signal processor (DSP) used for image processing, in digital cameras ...
, a feature originally introduced in the A5 and last updated in the A7, with better temporal and spatial noise reduction as well as improved local tone mapping. The A9 directly integrates an embedded M9 motion
coprocessor A coprocessor is a computer processor used to supplement the functions of the primary processor (the CPU). Operations performed by the coprocessor may be floating-point arithmetic, graphics, signal processing, string processing, cryptography or I ...
, a feature originally introduced with the A7 as a separate chip. In addition to servicing the accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, and barometer, the M9 coprocessor can recognize
Siri Siri ( ) is a virtual assistant that is part of Apple Inc.'s iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, macOS, tvOS, and audioOS operating systems. It uses voice queries, gesture based control, focus-tracking and a natural-language user interface to answer qu ...
voice commands. The A9 has video codec encoding support for
H.264 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), also referred to as H.264 or MPEG-4 Part 10, is a video compression standard based on block-oriented, motion-compensated coding. It is by far the most commonly used format for the recording, compression, and distr ...
. It has decoding support for HEVC, H.264, MPEG‑4, and
Motion JPEG Motion JPEG (M-JPEG or MJPEG) is a video compression format in which each video frame or interlaced field of a digital video sequence is compressed separately as a JPEG image. Originally developed for multimedia PC applications, Motion JPEG ...
. The A9 features a custom storage solution, which uses an Apple-designed
NVMe NVM Express (NVMe) or Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Specification (NVMHCIS) is an open, logical-device interface specification for accessing a computer's non-volatile storage media usually attached via PCI Express (PCIe) bus. The ...
-based controller that communicates over a
PCIe PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express), officially abbreviated as PCIe or PCI-e, is a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard, designed to replace the older PCI, PCI-X and AGP bus standards. It is the common ...
connection. The iPhone 6s' NAND design is more akin to a PC-class SSD than embedded flash memory common on mobile devices. This gives the phone a significant storage performance advantage over competitors which often use
eMMC The MultiMediaCard, officially abbreviated as MMC, is a memory card standard used for solid-state storage. Unveiled in 1997 by SanDisk and Siemens, MMC is based on a surface-contact low pin-count serial interface using a single memory stack sub ...
or UFS to connect to their flash memory.


Microarchitecture

The A9's
microarchitecture In computer engineering, microarchitecture, also called computer organization and sometimes abbreviated as µarch or uarch, is the way a given instruction set architecture (ISA) is implemented in a particular processor. A given ISA may be imp ...
is similar to the second generation Cyclone (used in A8 chip) microarchitecture. Some of the microarchitectural features are as follows: About half of the performance boost over A8 comes from the 1.85 GHz frequency. About a quarter comes from the better memory subsystem (3× bigger caches). The remaining quarter comes from the microarchitectural tuning and smaller technology node.


Encryption

According to Apple, "Every iOS device has a dedicated AES-256 crypto engine built into the DMA path between the flash storage and main system memory, making file encryption highly efficient. On A9 or later A-series processors, the flash storage subsystem is on an isolated bus that is only granted access to memory containing user data via the DMA crypto engine."


Dual sourcing(Chipgate)

Apple A9 chips are fabricated by two companies:
Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...
and
TSMC Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (TSMC; also called Taiwan Semiconductor) is a Taiwanese multinational semiconductor contract manufacturing and design company. It is the world's most valuable semiconductor company, the world' ...
. The Samsung version is called APL0898, which is manufactured on a 14 nm FinFET process and is 96 mm2 large, while the TSMC version is called APL1022, which is manufactured on a 16 nm FinFET process and is 104.5 mm2 large. There was intended to be no significant difference in performance between the parts, but in October 2015, it was alleged that iPhone 6S models with Samsung-fabricated A9 chips consistently measured shorter battery life than those with TSMC-fabricated versions in CPU heavy usage; web browsing and graphics were not very different. Apple responded that "tests which run the processors with a continuous heavy workload until the battery depletes are not representative of real-world usage", and said that internal testing combined with customer data demonstrated a variance of only 2–3%.


Naming

While the Twister CPU core implements the ARMv8-A instruction set architecture licensed from
ARM Holdings Arm is a British semiconductor and software design company based in Cambridge, England. Its primary business is in the design of ARM processors (CPUs). It also designs other chips, provides software development tools under the DS-5, RealView ...
, it is an independent CPU design and is unrelated to the much older but similarly named
Cortex-A9 The ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore is a 32-bit multi-core processor that provides up to 4 cache-coherent cores, each implementing the ARM v7 architecture instruction set. It was introduced in 2007. Features Key features of the Cortex-A9 core are: * ...
and
ARM9 ARM9 is a group of 32-bit RISC ARM processor cores licensed by ARM Holdings for microcontroller use. The ARM9 core family consists of ARM9TDMI, ARM940T, ARM9E-S, ARM966E-S, ARM920T, ARM922T, ARM946E-S, ARM9EJ-S, ARM926EJ-S, ARM968E-S, ARM99 ...
CPU that are designed by ARM themselves and implement the 32-bit
ARMv7-A ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures for computer processors, configured ...
and ARMv5E versions of the architecture.


Gallery

The processors are nearly identical visually. The packaging have the same dimensions (approx 15.0×14.5 mm) and only superficial differences, like the designation text. Inside the packaging the silicon die differs in size. File:Apple A9 APL0898.jpg, APL0898, the Samsung version of the A9. File:Apple A9 APL1022.jpg, APL1022, the TSMC version of the A9. File:A9 APL0898 iPhone6s mlb 820-5507-A.jpg, A9 (APL0898) SoC on iPhone SE main logic board. File:A9 APL1022 iPhoneSE 082-00282.jpg, A9 (APL1022) SoC on iPhone 6s main logic board.


ARKit

The A9 processor is listed as the minimum requirement for
ARKit iOS 11 is the iOS version history, eleventh major release of the iOS mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc., being the successor to iOS 10. It was announced at the company's Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Worldwide Developers C ...
.


Products that include the Apple A9

* iPhone 6S & 6S Plus *
iPhone SE (1st generation) The first-generation iPhone SE (also known as iPhone SE or iPhone SE 2016; ''SE'' is an initialism of ''Special Edition'') is a smartphone that was designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. It is part of the 9th generation of the iP ...
*
iPad (5th generation) The iPad 9.7-inch (officially iPad (5th generation)) is a tablet computer designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. After its announcement on March 21, 2017, conflicting naming conventions spawned a number of different names, including ...


See also

*
Apple silicon Apple silicon is a series of system on a chip (SoC) and system in a package (SiP) processors designed by Apple Inc., mainly using the ARM architecture. It is the basis of most new Mac computers as well as iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, Apple TV, ...
, the range of ARM-based processors designed by Apple. *
Apple A9X An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple trees are cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, ' ...


References

{{S-end A9 ARM architecture Computer-related introductions in 2015 Products and services discontinued in 2022 64-bit microprocessors Apple silicon