Apple iDevice architecture

Since XCode4.5, apple have drop support to ARM architecture of ARMv6, and set the minimum device version to 4.3, which burden developers that need to support older version.

To understand how it affect developers, one should understand there are 2 fields they need to handle with, they are:

1. ARM Architecture
2. iOS Deployment Target

to know more about architecture, please visit instruction set architecture.

In this article, we mainly focus on the architecture of different apple device.

The first question you may want to ask is, what iDevice is using ARMv6 architecture? The answer is simple, For iPhone, it is iPhone(original) and iPhone 3G. For iPod Touch, it is only 1st generation.
For iPad, none of them are using ARMv6. Here is more detail:

iPhone:

Model	CPU Core	ARM architecture
iPhone	620 MHz (underclocked to 412 MHz) ARM 1176JZ(F)-S	ARMv6
iPhone 3G
iPhone 3GS	833 MHz (underclocked to 600 MHz) ARM Cortex-A8	ARMv7
iPhone 4	1 GHz (underclocked to 800 MHz) Apple A4
iPhone 4S	1 GHz (underclocked to 800 MHz) Dual-core Apple A5
iPhone 5	Apple A6	ARMv7s

iPod Touch:

Model	CPU Core	ARM architecture
1st generation	620 MHz (underclocked to 412 MHz, originally 400 MHz) ARM 1176JZ(F)-S	ARMv6
2nd generation	620 MHz (underclocked to 533 MHz) ARM 1176JZ(F)-S	ARMv7
3rd generation	833 MHz (underclocked to 600 MHz) ARM Cortex-A8 core
4th generation	1 GHz (underclocked to 800 MHz) ARM Cortex-A8
5th generation	ARM Cortex-A9

iPad:

Model	CPU Core	ARM architecture
iPad (original)	1 GHz ARM Cortex-A8	ARMv7
iPad 2	1 GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9
iPad (3rd generation)	1 GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9