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First Photo of Apple's A10 Chip for iPhone 7 Appears With Mid-July Production Date

Less than one month before Apple is expected to announce the iPhone 7 (http://www.macrumors.com/roundup/iphone-7/) and iPhone 7 Plus, Chinese repair shop GeekBar has shared the first photo of what appears to be the next-generation A10 chip destined for the smartphones on <a href="(http://ww2.sinaimg.cn/mw690/005vDhTujw1f6ozxlojp5j30ku0rs0vl.jpg)">Weibo[/url]. The number of pins appears to be consistent with the A9 chip's 64-bit LPDDR4 interface.





While the photo could easily be faked, the chipset is labeled with a 1628 date code, corresponding with mid-July production. Additionally, GeekBar has accurately leaked components for unreleased Apple products in the past, including the [url=http://www.macrumors.com/roundup/iphone-6/]iPhone 6 (http://www.macrumors.com/2015/08/01/iphone-6s-display/)s display assembly[/url] and iPhone 6 schematics showing a 128GB storage option (http://www.macrumors.com/2014/08/21/128gb-iphone-6/).





<img src="(http://cdn.macrumors.com/article-new/2016/08/A10-chip.jpg)" alt="A10-chip" width="520" height="396" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-515456" />


What is pictured here is not the complete A10 chip and may be the RAM layer that is stacked on top of the A10 wafer as one system-on-a-chip, rather than the processor itself. Apple A-series chips are typically labeled on all four edges, suggesting this chipset is in a mid-production state.





TSMC is expected to be the sole supplier (http://www.macrumors.com/2015/09/14/tsmc-a10-chip-iphone-7-march-2016/) of Apple's faster A10 chip based on its 16nm FinFET WLP process (http://www.macrumors.com/2015/11/06/tsmc-a10-production-info-wlp/). The new processor should bring performance improvements to the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. The smartphones are expected to be announced on September 7 and released on September 16.





Last year, TSMC-built A9 chips were found to outperform Samsung-built A9 chips (http://www.macrumors.com/2015/10/07/tsmc-samsung-a9-battery-tests/) in early iPhone 6s (http://www.macrumors.com/roundup/iphone-6s/) battery benchmarks, but subsequent tests showed less significant impacts (http://www.macrumors.com/2015/10/08/samsung-tsmc-a9-videos/) that Apple later said amounted to only a 2-3% difference (http://www.macrumors.com/2015/10/08/apple-a9-chip-2-3-percent-difference/) in "real world" battery life. Samsung is not expected to be an A10 chip supplier.

<div class="linkback">Related Roundup: iPhone 7 (http://www.macrumors.com/roundup/iphone-7/)
Tags: weibo.com (http://www.macrumors.com/roundup/weibo-com/), GeekBar (http://www.macrumors.com/roundup/geekbar/), A10 chip (http://www.macrumors.com/roundup/a10-chip/) </div>
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Source: First Photo of Apple's A10 Chip for iPhone 7 Appears With Mid-July Production Date (http://www.macrumors.com/2016/08/10/apple-a10-chip-first-photo-weibo/)