iPhone 5 found to have 1GB of RAM, custom processor

As usual, Apple didn’t give us many details regarding the internals of the iPhone 5 outside of what it lists on the handset’s Features page. We know it has an A6 processor, but that’s about it.

Luckily, some smart folks have done some digging and have uncovered some interesting information about Apple’s new smartphone. For instance, they’ve confirmed it has 1GB of RAM…

From the technical wizards over at Anandtech:

“Apple thankfully didn’t obscure the details of its A6 slide at the launch event, which gave us a Samsung part number: K3PE7E700F-XGC2. Through crafty navigation of Samsung’s product guide, Brian Klug got us the details. The K3P tells us we’re looking at a dual-channel LPDDR2 package with 32-bit channels. The E7E7 gives us the density of each of the two DRAM die (512MB per die, 1GB total). The final two characters in the part number give us the cycle time/data rate, which in this case is 1066MHz.”

While 1GB may not be as much RAM as some of the other handsets made by Samsung, and others, have, it’s a welcome upgrade from last year’s iPhone which only had 512MB. iOS is generally pretty resourceful when it comes to memory, but the extra 512MB certainly won’t hurt anything.

And that’s not all Anandtech found. It also discovered that the iPhone 5’s A6 chip is a completely new processor, not just a retooled A5 like originally thought. In fact, the site says that it’s Apple’s own custom creation — its first SoC (system on a chip) designed completely in-house.

“I received some information pointing to a move away from the ARM Cortex A9 used in the A5. Given Apple’s reliance on fully licensed ARM cores in the past, the expected performance gains and unpublishable information that started all of this I concluded Apple’s A6 SoC likely featured two ARM Cortex A15 cores.

It turns out I was wrong. But pleasantly surprised. The A6 is the first Apple SoC to use its own ARMv7 based processor design. The CPU core(s) aren’t based on a vanilla A9 or A15 design from ARM IP, but instead are something of Apple’s own creation.”

We still don’t know how many cores the A6 has for sure. Anandtech says it’s assuming two, but it hasn’t been confirmed yet. We also don’t know how the iPhone 5 will measure up to other phones in terms of performance. Apple hasn’t given any CPU speeds or GPU details.

We’ll obviously know more about the handset and its internals once the iPhone 5 gets the usual teardown treatment this week. And it’ll be interesting to see how it does against the competition in performance testing. Judging by the hands-on videos, It certainly looks speedy.

We’ll obviously pass along all of this information as soon as we get it.