Apple Cyclone / A7 Discussion

There's some nice analysis of Apple's Cyclone CPU in anandtech's iPad Air review:

http://anandtech.com/show/7460/apple-ipad-air-review/2

Pretty damned wide CPU. Memory interface width is 64 bit now but bandwidth is actually better.

 

Other tidbits include:

-Resizable ROB with iPad air able to have 20% more instructions in flight.
-Low clock speed @1.4 ghz or so compared to Krait 330 @ 2.3 ghz but very high IPC apparent from benchmarks.

Looks like a "module" is structured around a pair of cores tied to 1 mb of cache. This might only be for this gen of iPhone though, Apple has the luxury of being able to afford doing a dramatically different microarchitecture each year since they're selling tens of millions of these things.