Apple is pitching its new iPad Pro a powerful tablet computer than can replace your laptop computer. Not every agrees with the practicalities of that view, but the silicon inside the tablet certainly deliver the power. To deliver that the iPad Pro has one of the most advanced chips currently on the market.
Thanks to analysis conducted by Tech Insights, it’s clear that the A10X system on chip at the heart of the system is a 10nm system.
The A10X die size comes in at 96.4 mm2 as compared to the previous generation, A9X at 143.9 mm2, which was built on TSMC’s 16 FF-Turbo technology. This is an impressive full node scale, when accounting for the extra CPU cores built into the A10X and extra IP blocks of the A10 vs. A9 family. We estimate a 45% die level scale (0.55x the area of running on the previous technology), based on our detailed floorplan analyses of the Apple A-series.
This is the first 10nm chip from the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). It follows Samsung’s use of the 10nm process for the chips inside the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus handsets, so it is not the first to market overall but this is the first 10nm system in a large-format tablet.
Using a 10nm fabrication process broadly offers manufacturers faster clock speeds and better power consumption, both key areas in mobile technology.
Of course having all of this power is immaterial if it cannot be harnessed, and this is perhaps the area where the iPad Pro needs more work. iOS 11 is adding an improved multi-tasking environment and a basic file manager, but it is still built around a touch interface that is more suited to smartphones rather than desktops. If the iPad Pro is going to make that jump out of the tablet space into something more fitting of the ‘Pro’ tag then the software (both from Apple and from third-party developers) needs to make the same leap forward as the hardware.
