Apple A9 Chip, and a brief history of the A Series

In less than a month, Apple is expected to release its 9th iteration of the Apple A Series processor, which will power next generation iPad and iPhone devices. As usual, the company is tight-lipped on specs, however, if history is of any indication, the specs of the new CPU should be fairly easy to deduce.

The history of Apple’s A Series has been always rather consistent, with 2 new CPUs released every year, and specs nearly doubled with each iteration.

The A4 series, which powered the iPhone 4, started off as a 32-bit System-On-A-Chip, with a single core, followed by the A5 and A5X with only slightly better specs.

With the introduction of the A6 and A6X, the specs improvements more than doubled, starting a consistent trend, with processors featuring twice the speed of their predecessor, through the A7 1.3, A7 1.4, A8 and A8X.

In light of this trend, there is a chance that the A9 processor about to be unveiled, will feature improvements in performance, as much as 5 times that if the original A4 SoP and SoC.

The improvements in processing speed will likely be attributed to the new 14 nanometers architecture, Based on this assumption, we can also expect the A9 chip to feature multi core technology. iPhones and iPad owners will notice a dramatic changes in performance, and truly desktop class responsiveness.