You should get out of the Apple bubble more often, though to be fair, when Steve Jobs stands on stage and claims he designed/invented/built something, the media seem to give him a pass in general, despite his reputation as a master salesman/liar.
Even if they had designed their own chip, basic tests (as well as iFixit style tear-downs) revealed that "There's not much revolutionary here. In fact, the A4 is quite similar to the Samsung processor Apple uses in the iPhone."
or
"To be clear, we are not talking about full custom circuit design, yet. This is about choosing from essentially the same catalog of individual IP building blocks but selecting fewer of them."
"[Compared with the Samsung chip used for the 3GS] The simplest and most striking observation is just how little discernible change there is to the number or type of circuit block. Both devices have a relatively high percentage of the die consumed by an ARM CPU core containing a large L2 SRAM cache memory along with 10 additional blocks of digital logic. The A4 die is smaller, 51.8 mm2 versus 72.2 mm2, but this says little about the design since A4 is manufactured with 45-nm technology."
"From a circuit design perspective, the changes in the subdivisions of chip real estate are relatively minor. A lot can be attributed to transitioning manufacturing to 45-nm. To summarize the block level comparison with the two "reference" designs, there were no wholesale changes to the floorplan. Yes, the A4 is different, but not by more than one or two blocks. ... It is also reasonable to describe it as evolutionary compared to the references."
The reason for the similarity in their chips was that Intrinsity did most of the custom design for Samsung's chip, Apple also worked with Intrisity and subsequently acquired them.
No. Intrinsity worked with Samsung to develop a low-power variant of the Cortex-A8, that part of the two chips are identical, not similar. And the rest of the chip is similar because it's built from a Samsung reference design with a few bits left out that Apple didn't want. It's like saying "hold the mustard" makes you a master hot-dog crafstman.
Even if they had designed their own chip, basic tests (as well as iFixit style tear-downs) revealed that "There's not much revolutionary here. In fact, the A4 is quite similar to the Samsung processor Apple uses in the iPhone."
or
"To be clear, we are not talking about full custom circuit design, yet. This is about choosing from essentially the same catalog of individual IP building blocks but selecting fewer of them."
"[Compared with the Samsung chip used for the 3GS] The simplest and most striking observation is just how little discernible change there is to the number or type of circuit block. Both devices have a relatively high percentage of the die consumed by an ARM CPU core containing a large L2 SRAM cache memory along with 10 additional blocks of digital logic. The A4 die is smaller, 51.8 mm2 versus 72.2 mm2, but this says little about the design since A4 is manufactured with 45-nm technology."
"From a circuit design perspective, the changes in the subdivisions of chip real estate are relatively minor. A lot can be attributed to transitioning manufacturing to 45-nm. To summarize the block level comparison with the two "reference" designs, there were no wholesale changes to the floorplan. Yes, the A4 is different, but not by more than one or two blocks. ... It is also reasonable to describe it as evolutionary compared to the references."
from: http://eetimes.com/electronics-news/4200451/Apple-s-A4-disse...