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by gchadwick 3934 days ago
Turns out I'm wrong. The A6 used a variant named ARMv7s: http://www.primatelabs.com/blog/2012/09/apple-a6/

It has two extra integer division instructions and some extra floating point. Though the blog says that the extra floating point instructions are also present in ARMv7 (in XCode) but unused.

So perhaps they're allowed to add whatever they want? I suspect only the lawyers truely know...

What is pretty certain is they couldn't break compatability with the ARM architecture.

1 comments

Those were the instructions (integer divide and VFPv4) added in Cortex-A15 chips.