iPhone 5 Specs Begin To Be Analyzed, 1GHz Processor, 1GB RAM

Apple doesn’t play the specifications game. They don’t announce things like memory, chip speed, or any of those other numbers that some of us love to obsess over. Thankfully, that doesn’t stop anyone else from doing the legwork and figuring those numbers out — which is exactly what is happening right now.

Geekbench (via MacRumors) has the first round of information on the iPhone 5, and it scores a whopping 1601, more than twice the 632 of the iPhone 4S. Their specs — if correct — point to a 1GHz dual-core processor, and 1GB of RAM (double what the 4S had). That puts the iPhone 5 on parity with the quad core Samsung Galaxy S III.

AnandTech has released similar information, but gathered instead from analyzing other sources of information. As usual, they get deep into the nitty gritty stuff.

Firstly, it appears that Apple has used their own design for the A6 processor, not building it on extant technology:

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.

Then, by analyzing the parts numbers shown in the slideshow for the iPhone 5 introduction, AnandTech discovered a bit about the memory:

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.

That gives it more memory bandwidth than any previous iPhone, but less than the iPad 3rd generation.

There you have it kids, the iPhone 5 has 1GHz processor, 1GB RAM, and all kinds of new and shiny.