AMD PRO A A6 A6 PRO-7050B 

Chipworks and iFixIt also took a look at the LTE modem, Wi-Fi chip, audio amplifier, and other aspects of the iPhone 5's internals, and it is definitely worth a read for the impressive imagery alone.

Following that, Anandtech posted an article that stated it was in a licensed Cortex A15 design.

At this point, it still looks like the A6’s CPU core is similar to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 Krait — roughly doubling the performance of the Cortex-A9 chip, while still remaining very power efficient.

Not only have their engineers reverse engineered the A6, they’ve also taken a look at the Sony camera sensor — and over on iFixit, Chipworks has shared some die shots of the Qualcomm MDM9615 radio and the Broadcom WiFi chip.

This makes the processor more efficient overall, and with a good combination of firmware and process technology can create a nice leap in mobile performance.

The excitement leading up to the iPhone announcement was somewhat muted as compared to years past, and a lot of that could be attributed to what has been happening in the Android market.