> One non-verified source cannot be trusted, sorry.
I don't work for Apple, and if I did I would value my job more over satisfying your need for a citation. But anyway, since I cannot prove or disprove that Apple did design their own chip, which they did, I will point out that NVidia, a much smaller company, has managed to do just what I claimed, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver
> Apple may be a big company, but they definitely lack the skill set to do such large chips themselves.
Really? I think their purchase of a processor design company in 2008 speaks to the fact that they do have this talent in house: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi
PA Semi designed their own POWER CPU, which they developed from scratch. Don't tell me these people (who work for Apple now) don't have the capabilities and resources to design a processor which can implement the ARM ISA.
Either provide a citation that proves that Apple hasn't designed their own core implementing the ARM ISA, or stop demanding some from my claim, which has a lot more evidence behind it.
The fact that they have dual sourced CPUs from TSMC and Samsung, which are on different processor nodes, thus requiring a different layout and mask, tells me that Apple's hardware engineers absolutely know what they're doing, and can design the internals of a chip:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9686/the-apple-iphone-6s-and-i...
Plus, around the time of the PA Semi acquisition, news outlets reported that the engineers were working on a custom CPU for Apple devices: http://appleinsider.com/articles/08/09/15/apples_pa_semi_wor...
I honestly don't know why I put so much time into refuting this. Many other people on the internet think that Apple is designing their own core inside the iPhone, how else would a dual core chip smoking the living shit out of Samsung and Qualcomm's quad and octo core processors?
Here, have another person who says Apple design it themselves. http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8083459&cid=506143...
Citation needed. Different from Anand's mentioning of "custom designed implementation of ARM ISA" on his webpage without any proof and further copied and taken to Wikipedia. One non-verified source cannot be trusted, sorry. Of course the chip is a custom design ( as it mentioned @ Wikipedia ), because ARM generally do not provide the peripherals and you can "bolt" whatever you like. Apple may be a big company, but they definitely lack the skill set to do such large chips themselves. The wild rumor goes to their attempt to ditch BRCM for wifi's chips for ages, something that would have happened if they had the resources to design something themselves. Not to mention the huge chunk of chip on the new macbook 12", rumored to be from the acquisition of Anobit, which if you have some knowledge of design is at least 4 generations behind. That of course is a speculation, much like Anand's quote of "custom ISA implementation" from A8 and onward, but at least the nm process can be seen to be quite old.