Now that the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus have been released, the usual suspects have started to take them apart to get more information about the things Apple doesn't talk about. Last week, iFixit took the phones apart and identified many of the internal components and the battery capacities. Today, Chipworks picked up where it left off on Friday, taking up-close photos of the Apple A8 chip and trying to deduce what exactly is going on in there.

As was previously rumored, Chipworks has confirmed that the A8 is built on Taiwan Semiconductor's (TSMC) 20nm process rather than the 28nm Samsung process used for the A7. This is the first time one of Apple's chips has been produced by anyone other than Samsung—many of the previous reports also suggest that Apple has been looking for ways to reduce its reliance on one of its chief competitors, though a report from Re/code indicates that Apple may still be using Samsung to produce around 40 percent of the chips. Moving to a 20nm process has allowed Apple to cram roughly two billion transistors into a chip that is 13 percent smaller than the A7.

Chipworks confirms that Apple is still using a dual-core CPU, as we reported in our review yesterday. While Qualcomm, Samsung, and Nvidia have all built four, six, and even eight-core chips in an effort to boost performance, Apple has chosen to stick with fewer, more powerful cores instead. Chipworks (together with AnandTech) has also surmised that Apple is using a quad-core Imagination Technologies GX6450 to boost the A8's graphics scores by 50 percent relative to the A7. Previously, it was thought that Apple had moved to a six-core GX6550, but it looks like the quad-core version's GPU cores are bigger (and thus, more powerful) than expected.

We did some extensive testing on the A8 in our iPhone 6 review and found Apple had mostly delivered on its promised performance gains for games and 64-bit apps (though 32-bit apps get less of a boost). We also tested Apple's claim that the chip wouldn't throttle under heavy loads, and while we found that it definitely does throttle, it does so less aggressively than the previous-generation Apple A7. We'll point you to Chipworks' extensive teardown if you'd like to read more about the camera's Sony-made sensor, the NFC sensor that will be used for Apple Pay and some of the other tiny components.