Rumors: Apple asked experts about sapphire screens in 2012, iPhone 6's 'A8' to be 2GHz dual-core chi
A pair of suspect rumors regarding Apple's next-generation devices made their way to the internet Friday, as one British academic claimed he had been contacted by the iPhone maker about sapphire displays while Chinese media rebuffed reports that Apple's "A8" SoC will move beyond two processing cores.
A purported iPhone 6 display cover in a deformation test | Source: Nowhereelse.fr
Apple approached Professor Neil Alford -- the head of Imperial College London's Department of Materials -- regarding the feasibility of using sapphire to build device displays sometime in late 2012 or early 2013, the professor told The Guardian. Alford had been asked about the possible legitimacy of a purportedly-leaked sapphire component for the iPhone 6, which he said "could well be" an Apple part.
"I remember the Apple folk coming to speak to me about 18 months ago to discuss sapphire screens," Alford said. "They've obviously been busy since then, working with a sapphire manufacturer."
Apple's sapphire ambitions were revealed last November with the announcement of a $578 million agreement between the company and GT Advanced Technologies, makers of sapphire manufacturing equipment. Under the terms of the deal, Apple will finance the build-out of jointly-operated sapphire manufacturing plants in Arizona and Massachusetts while securing exclusive rights to the facilities' output.
While many believe Apple is planning to replace Corning's Gorilla Glass with home-grown sapphire on the face of its flagship iOS devices, not everyone is convinced. As AppleInsider showed last month, it is possible that Apple is simply planning for a future in which it ships nearly half a billion sapphire-covered Touch ID sensors and camera lenses each year.
TSMC's 12-inch wafer fab
On the silicon front, Chinese tech blog CNBeta claimed that Apple's so-called "A8" system-on-a-chip -- expected to be at the heart of the next-generation iPhone and iPad -- will continue to use the A7's dual-core architecture while receiving a clock speed boost to at least 2 gigahertz. That goes against earlier reports from Taiwanese trade media that claimed Apple would move to a quad-core configuration.
Architecture notwithstanding, most sources agree that at least part of Apple's A8 orders will go to Taiwanese contract fabricator TSMC as the Cupertino company attempts to disentangle itself from a long-standing supplier relationship with Samsung. Apple is said to have already begun receiving shipments of A8 processors built on TSMC's 20-nanometer fabrication line.
A purported iPhone 6 display cover in a deformation test | Source: Nowhereelse.fr
Apple approached Professor Neil Alford -- the head of Imperial College London's Department of Materials -- regarding the feasibility of using sapphire to build device displays sometime in late 2012 or early 2013, the professor told The Guardian. Alford had been asked about the possible legitimacy of a purportedly-leaked sapphire component for the iPhone 6, which he said "could well be" an Apple part.
"I remember the Apple folk coming to speak to me about 18 months ago to discuss sapphire screens," Alford said. "They've obviously been busy since then, working with a sapphire manufacturer."
Apple's sapphire ambitions were revealed last November with the announcement of a $578 million agreement between the company and GT Advanced Technologies, makers of sapphire manufacturing equipment. Under the terms of the deal, Apple will finance the build-out of jointly-operated sapphire manufacturing plants in Arizona and Massachusetts while securing exclusive rights to the facilities' output.
While many believe Apple is planning to replace Corning's Gorilla Glass with home-grown sapphire on the face of its flagship iOS devices, not everyone is convinced. As AppleInsider showed last month, it is possible that Apple is simply planning for a future in which it ships nearly half a billion sapphire-covered Touch ID sensors and camera lenses each year.
TSMC's 12-inch wafer fab
On the silicon front, Chinese tech blog CNBeta claimed that Apple's so-called "A8" system-on-a-chip -- expected to be at the heart of the next-generation iPhone and iPad -- will continue to use the A7's dual-core architecture while receiving a clock speed boost to at least 2 gigahertz. That goes against earlier reports from Taiwanese trade media that claimed Apple would move to a quad-core configuration.
Architecture notwithstanding, most sources agree that at least part of Apple's A8 orders will go to Taiwanese contract fabricator TSMC as the Cupertino company attempts to disentangle itself from a long-standing supplier relationship with Samsung. Apple is said to have already begun receiving shipments of A8 processors built on TSMC's 20-nanometer fabrication line.
Comments
I call BS.
If Apple did approach Neil Alford about Sapphire, that would make him a consultant. Apple would have compensated him and made him sign an NDA.
If A8 is dual core, good. Glad Apple isn't jumping on the "more cores for the hell of it" bandwagon. They know what theyre doing when it comes to chip design, which is why the A7 still blows everything else out of the water in most respects, even Samsung's 8 core mobile chips.
I call BS.
If Apple did approach Neil Alford about Sapphire, that would make him a consultant. Apple would have compensated him and made him sign an NDA.
Yes I would have to agree and any comments he is now making about Apple and it use of Sapphire would be a breach of that NDA.
Yes I would have to agree and any comments he is now making about Apple and it use of Sapphire would be a breach of that NDA.
To play the devil's advocate, the NDA could have expired by now, or it may not have covered the fact that Apple spoke with him about Sapphire screens, but only the details of what they spoke about. Furthermore, when he mentions Apple, he could be referencing a student or somebody who was working with Apple, and decided to get some initial advice from him in an informal context.
If A8 is dual core, good. Glad Apple isn't jumping on the "more cores for the hell of it" bandwagon. They know what theyre doing when it comes to chip design, which is why the A7 still blows everything else out of the water in most respects, even Samsung's 8 core mobile chips.
a mobile device is a i/o device. It's the GPUs that do most of the work. With a single user and strong constraints on power consumption, Dual core (one controlling the general interface, one controlling the logic of the the apps in compute state) is enough. As well as separate chips to do the dirty work of all the other contextual interrupts (networking, motion,sound), it makes sense to focus on efficiency of fewer cores.
The amount of sapphire that GT Advanced Technologies can produce at the Mesa, Arizona plant is equivalent to all other sapphire manufacturing on Earth which includes currently shipping Apple products, namely the iPhone 5S. Apple would not need to double the manufacturing capacity of the entire Earth to slightly more than double their usage of sapphire.
Apple will not increase the clock speed to 2 GHz.
Below, is a post I made to another thread -- to put it in context, this is the subject of the article:
http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/177264/micron-ddr4-ram-rumored-to-improve-battery-life-speed-in-apples-future-iphones-ipads-macs
Perhaps the iPhone 6 has 2 cores while the iPad Air 2 has 4. Apple has a lot of code that can use multiple cores and they can really help when multi-tasking. More cores make it easier to drive data to the iPad's larger display.
If A8 is dual core, good. Glad Apple isn't jumping on the "more cores for the hell of it" bandwagon. They know what theyre doing when it comes to chip design, which is why the A7 still blows everything else out of the water in most respects, even Samsung's 8 core mobile chips.
Exactly- iOS doesn't need 4 cores. The only reason I could see them implementing it now is if legitimate multi-tasking is planning on coming to the iPad in the future and they want to make sure it has backwards capability.
Again- That's a long shot. I just don't see the need
Where I do see the need with Apple's A7 (and subsequently A8 SoC) is some more RAM. 1.5-2gb (particularly on iPad) would go great lengths at expanding capabilities there. Anandtech mentioned the bottleneck occurs with RAM before CPU on the A7. The A8 will only lengthen that.
All of that said- I can't wait to see whats released in September and October.
Engadget has an article up today regarding sapphire displays. I had overlooked the fact that a very few smartphone manufacturers already use for the screen.
http://www.engadget.com/2014/07/11/sapphire-displays/#continued
Perhaps the iPhone 6 has 2 cores while the iPad Air 2 has 4. Apple has a lot of code that can use multiple cores and they can really help when multi-tasking. More cores make it easier to drive data to the iPad's larger display.
Agree with you and Andysol. Yes, more cores can deliver nearly-linear performance gains (e.g. 12-core Mac Pro). This is mostly because of Apple's work on Grand Central Dispatch in both OS X (since 10.6) and iOS (since 4.0). GCD makes it vastly easier for developers to exploit multiprocessing, and optimizes it for them. Then there's OpenCL, which can use the massively parallel computing power of the GPU to perform general purpose computations if and when the GPU has spare cycles.
But multiprocessing (harnessing multiple CPUs) is useful at all times. Not just when you happen to be multitasking (which I assume you are defining as "switching between apps"). Even the most basic app needs multiple threads: one for handling GUI events and at least one background thread for doing computations to generate results to display. So any app can benefit from multiprocessing. Especially if if spawns many background threads. And it's easy to get many threads going, for example when fetching data from a URL and calculating a result to display and writing data to "disk" and updating iCloud all at once.
So, of course, bringing up the subject of quad-core A8 SoCs in next-gen iOS devices might trigger battery life concerns. Well, my theory is that the faster you finish intensive processing tasks, the sooner you can revert to "idle." So your total power usage would increase logarithmically instead of linearly. Firing up 4 cores at once may draw more peak current, but you'd be drawing that current for a shorter time. I'm sure Apple can and will tweak performance vs. power usage in Grand Central Dispatch. And the larger frame of the (rumored) iPhone 6 model(s) might allow for a slightly larger battery. We'll see.
Having said all that, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple did reserve the first quad-core A8 SoCs for the high-end of each iOS device line. Maybe they'll use the dual-core in the 4.7" iPhone and iPad mini Retina, and quad-core in the 5.5" iPhone and iPad Air. And maybe quad-core in a new high-end 4K Apple TV. Who knows?
Oh, and I almost forgot about the software side of performance. At WWDC, Apple announced the Swift programming language and Metal graphics API, both next-gen technologies that Apple claims are vastly faster than legacy Objective-C and OpenGL. Looking forward to both.
I call BS.
If Apple did approach Neil Alford about Sapphire, that would make him a consultant. Apple would have compensated him and made him sign an NDA.
I know that sounds reasonable but it doesn't explain why an accomplished scientist, head of the materials department and vice dean at a prestigious college would lie about something like this. That part doesn't make sense to me.
The amount of sapphire that GT Advanced Technologies can produce at the Mesa, Arizona plant is equivalent to all other sapphire manufacturing on Earth which includes currently shipping Apple products, namely the iPhone 5S. Apple would not need to double the manufacturing capacity of the entire Earth to slightly more than double their usage of sapphire.
The only source for those numbers is one guy who looked at customs documents and decided that he thinks Apple's furnaces could grow that much sapphire. Even if that magically is the eventual capacity of the plant, how do we know they plan to ramp up to full production immediately? I don't understand people who deal in absolutes.
Apple may increase clock speed to 2 GHz if they migrate to a big.LITTLE processor architecture.
Qualcomm has announced ARM-based hexa-core and octo-core big.LITTLE 20 nm processor architectures at 2 GHz clock speeds using dual-channel 1600 MHz LPDDR4 RAM for early 2015.
I think this strengthens Dick Applebaum's argument.
No.
No.
Care to point the class in another direction?
Funny. Hadn't seen that one.
They could have contacted him about an NDA and he could have said no. Not everybody rolls over when Apple comes knocking.