Apple A7 and Apple A8 are chips that are found on mobile Apple products such as iPhones and iPads. These chips are called SoC (System on Chip) as they contain all basic components of a computer such as processor, memory, timing devices, interfaces, and power management circuits, on a single chip. Apple A8 is the latest chip that Apple currently use as per today and Apple A7 was the one that was used before A8. Apple A8 chip is, therefore, more advanced than A7 and hence is capable of providing better speed and graphics for applications and games.
Both Apple A7 and A8 contain a special unit called GPU(Graphical Processing Unit) that is designed especially to support better graphics.The GPU on A8 is more advanced than A7, so it can support games that need higherlevels of graphics rendering. The processor is the device that is responsible for all calculations and controlling. The processor on the A8 is powerful than what is on A7, so A8 can provide higher performance than A7 for applications. Also, since technology used for manufacturing A8 is more modern and advanced than what was used for A7, A8 chips are smaller in size despite the higher number of transistors.
Apple A7 Review – features of Apple A7
Apple A7 was first introduced in iPhone 5S that was introduced to the market in 2013. It contain s an ARMv8-A dual core CPU called Cyclone that the speed is around 1.3-1.4GHz. It is the first time a 64 bit processor was introduced on a consumer mobile phone or a tablet computer. Samsung did the manufacturing of A7 chips . A28 nm process is used for chip manufacturing where the chips contained over 1 billion transistors. The sensors are handled by motion co-processor called M7 in order to save power. There are two variants of Apple A7 as APL 0698 and APL 5698. APL 0698 was used in iPhone 5S and iPad Mini 2 while APL 5698 was used in iPad Air. The die size is identical in both, but APL 0698 has 1 GB of LPDDR3 RAM on chip itself while APL 5698 has no such stacked memory.
Apple A8 Review – features of Apple A8
Apple A8 is the latest Apple SoCas per today which the introduction happened in September 2014. It is currently being used in iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 plus. The processor is an enhanced version of ARMv8 dual core Cyclone processor. Apple A8 chip is manufactured by TSMC where previous Apple SoCchips were manufactured by Samsung. An advanced 20-nanometer process is used in manufacturing of chips. According to Apple, A8 is 50% more energy efficient than A7. The performance of A8 is much higher than A7, but the size is about 15% smaller than A7. A co-processor called M8 is used together with A8 to facilitate measurements from sensors. In October 2014 with iPad Air 2, a variant of A8 called A8X was introduced which consists an extra core while the frequency is further high.
What is the difference between Apple A7 and A8 Processors?
| Apple A7 | Apple A8 | |
| Date of release | September 20th 2013 | September 9th2014 |
| Designer | Apple | Apple |
| Manufacturer | Samsung | TSMC |
| Minimum feature size | 28 nm | 20 nm |
| Die Size | 104 mm2 | 89 mm2 |
| CPU | 2 x ARMv8 64 bit Cyclone cores | 2 x ARMv8 64 bit Enhanced Cyclone cores |
| No of transistors | About 2 billion | Over 1 billion |
| Instruction Set | ARMv8-A | ARMv8-A |
| Micro-architecture | Cyclone | Cyclone Generation 2 |
| Co-processor | Apple M7 | Apple M8 |
| RAM | 1 GB of LPDDR3 DRAM (in APL0698). | 1GB of LPDDR3 |
| GPU | IMG Power VR G6430 | IMG Power VR GX6450 |
| L1 Cache | 64KB Instruction cache + 64 KB data cache per core | 64KB Instruction cache + 64 KB data cache per core |
| L2 Cache | 1MB shared | 1MB shared |
| L3 Cache | 4MB | 4MB |
Summary:
Apple A7 vs A8
Both Apple A7 and A8 are used on Apple mobile products. The latest one is the Apple A8 which is the successor of Apple A7. Apple A8 despite the smaller size, when compared to A7, has much higher performance and energy efficiency than A7. Moreover, A8 can render better graphics than A7. So, generally Apple A8 can run applications and games with better performance than on Apple A7.