Everything about it is standard. It is a standard ARM processor, just as Samsung's Exynos or Qualcomm's Snapdragon. The only special thing about is that Apple does not sell it to third parties, AFAIK.
You know, it's not like Apple went out and invented a completely new CPU architecture and instruction set from scratch.
I believe Exynos was a standard ARM design but Apple and Qualcomm are both custom designed ARM processors. Both companies (and I believe Samsung now has one as well) have instruction set licenses so they can design processors compatible with ARM. They are not standard ARM designs.
Actually.....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_system_on_a_chip
Since the A4, Apple's chips are designed by Apple. They were based on standard ARM designs until the A6. Apple designed their own ARMv7 chips as opposed to licensing standard designs.
Coincidentally, the A6 and A7 have been the two chips that have brought Apple to the forefront of the "benchmark wars". Whereas they used to rely solely on efficiency and tight integration despite somewhat lagging processor power, the A6 and A7 were both (at the time of their release) the fastest mobile chips out there.
There are tons of manufacturing and hardware design processes that Apple has innovated and even invented, though none of it is really sexy because we don't see what goes into the building of these devices.
I still hold the advent of super large displays came about as the need for more power and battery life in highly-inefficient systems like Android used to be (especially skinned Android). It just so happened people liked the larger screens and companies like HTC and Samsung did a good job marketing them.
Apple on the other hand has always tried to find a way to pack more into the same or less space. The results have been new manufacturing processes, new battery chemistry, customer processor/SoC designs etc.
And I still say many of these features they've borrowed can be considered innovations because they actually made them work. You don't think Apple had a hand in designing the TouchID hardware? You don't think Apple's tight ecosystem integration will give Continuity a huge edge over platform-agnostic cloud services?
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Ya ya....let's trot out all the prototypes everyone else had but ignore the fact that the iPhone was in prototype well before 2007 as well.
And isn't the whole idea that Samsung was very involved in Apple manufacturing processes so they had a leg up on the industry in knowing what Apple would do?
Perhaps those Samsung prototypes of 2006 were based on their knowledge of an iPhone prototype?
And even though people love to squeal about the "rounded rectangle" stuff, as has already been pointed out, software was the main focus of the first two patent trials. Which, I believe Samsung lost. Had Samsung simply stated "we like these things about your software, can we license them", none of this would be necessary.....
Apple certainly borrows from other companies. But how many licensing agreements do they have in place? I know they have them with Microsoft, Nokia, Google, HTC, Motorola....they may tout their implementations as "brand new" but that's because they are. While the underlying feature may have been borrowed, only Apple does things exactly like Apple. That "borrowing" they do is licensed.
Samsung doesn't seem to care about that. I think one of the bigger instances of Apple ignoring licensing had to do with Samsung trying to hold on to a bunch of LTE/wireless patents and claiming they weren't standard essential.
At any rate....people want to have it both ways. Either Apple copied and Samsung didn't or Samsung copied and Apple didn't.
I'm here to say both borrowed and Samsung did so illegally at times.
To top it all off, here's a link to a 2005 iPhone prototype that proves Apple really started the larger display craze:
http://www.networkworld.com/article...tos-of-apple-s-earliest-iphone-prototype.html
