Apple iPhone 5 A6 processor detailed and benchmarked

Apple made little mention of the A6 chip that powers its iPhone 5 during its keynote last week. The chipset, although undoubtedly powerful, was something of a mystery. 

Anandtech, which not only has benchmarks of the chipset but also details about its composition, RAM, and clock speed, outed the spec of Apple's A6 chipset over the weekend. .

Based on the Samsung part number, Apple’s A6 chipset is packaged-stacked with 1GB of dual-channel RAM, according to the report.

Initially said to be an ARM A15 chip, it is now understood that Apple’s A6 CPU is based on ARM’s A9 design. Apple has modified the chipset extensively, however, in a similar fashion to what Qualcomm does with its Snapdragon chipsets.

This, according to Uber Gizmo, makes it ‘possible to execute more instructions per cycle and this has been a proven method to boost performance without increasing frequency and power consumption.’

‘The clock speed is 1066MHz. Anandtech’s max memory bandwidth chart shows that the iPhone 5 has about 33 per cent more memory bandwidth (8,528MB/sec) than the iPhone 4S.’

The extensive work Apple has undertaken here has yielded some very impressive benchmark results, too.

According to a report on 9to5Mac, Apple’s iPhone 5 scored 1601 in Geekbench – Apple’s iPhone 4S scored 629. That makes it the fastest handset on the planet, beating Samsung’s Galaxy S3, HTC’s One X, and Asus’ Nexus 7.

Apple’s iPhone 5 gets its UK release date on September 21.