Apple A6X uncovered

Allan Yogasingam, EETimes
11/15/2012 9:01 AM EST

Editor's note: After conducting a full teardown analysis of Apple Inc.'s iPad mini and iPad 4 tablets shortly after the devices hit the street Nov. 2, engineers from UBM TechInsights put the Apple A6X processor—available for the first time in the iPad 4—under the knife (and microscope).

Inside the new Apple iPad—or iPad 4—lies a modified A6 processor dubbed the A6X. This modified A6 processor still features two application processor cores and operates at 1 GHz. However, the architecture has been modified to include quad-core graphics as opposed to the three-core graphics of the original A6.

At first, we suspected that this new processor would continue to feature the PowerVR SGX543 family GPU. But further analysis found otherwise. From the decap image, right away you can see how the A6X processor is larger in area than its predecessor and the addition of another graphics core accounts for most of that increase.

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