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Apple A7

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Revision as of 08:05, 26 October 2024 by Asdfugil (talk | contribs) (I2C)
Apple A7 (S5L8960X/
S5L8965X)
Manufacturer Apple
Name A7 (S5L8960X/
S5L8965X)
Architecture aarch64
CPU 1.296 GHz (S5L8960X) / 1.392 GHz (S5L8965X) 2cores (2× Apple Cyclone)
GPU PowerVR G6430 (quad-core)
Year 2013
Process 28nm
Mainline Y
Components
CPU
Partial
UART
Works
Storage
No data
USB
Partial
Display
Partial
GPU
No data
Pinctrl
Works
I²C
No data
SPI
No data
Audio
No data
Video
No data
Thermal
No data
Camera
No data
Suspend
No data
Ethernet
No data
SATA
No data

Apple A7 is the world's first aarch64 SoC for consumer devices. The ARMv8 specification is announced in 2011 and silicon design especially on a new architecture takes way longer than 2 years, so it comes with its own fair share of errata.

Development

Bootloader

Non-free checkra1n 1337 or openra1n (which still have non-free blobs) needed to boot pongoOS.

From pongoOS, pongoterm can be used to boot m1n1, which can boot Linux appended to it.

Graphics

A7 uses a PowerVR G6430 GPU. Right now graphics in linux is just a simplefb.

I2C

I2C in A7 is compatible with the I2C in M1 which is supported upstream. However, little work has been put in towards i2c enablement in device tree files.

WiFi

A7 doesn't have built-in WiFi module. Devices use a broadcom module connected over internal USB.

Bluetooth

A7 doesn't have built-in bluetooth module. Every device uses it's own bluetooth module typically of broadcom origin

Modem

USB

A7 uses synopsys dwc2 version 2.72a. Role switching seems to be non-standard. There is also no support for the PHY in Linux. Hotplug appears to be broken.

GPS

A7 doesn't have built-in GPS module.

Devices with a Apple A7 Chipset

Device Mainline
Apple iPhone 5s