Apple iPhone SE teardown shows a blend of components from the iPhone 5s, 6, and 6s

The iPhone SE officially launches today in parts of Europe. Visually, the 4-inch smartphone carries an almost identical design to the iPhone 5s, but are the similarities only skin deep? A teardown over at Chipworks.com has revealed that a fair amount of its internal hardware are lifted from multiple existing iPhone models including the iPhone 6 and 6s.

The iPhone SE has the right mix of old and new

The Chipworks teardown concludes that only a small percentage of the iPhone SE is made up of new and original parts. Apple has cleverly cherry-picked the right pieces out of its back catalog to create a successful end product with up-to-date performance.

The Apple A9 is the heart of the iPhone SE

Chipworks confirms what was previously known: The iPhone SE is powered by the Apple A9 SoC as manufactured by TSMC. We can also see the same 2 GB LPDDR4 memory module from Hynix, 6-axis gyroscope, two audio chipsets (338S00105 and 338S1285) and the NXP 66V10 NFC chip for Apple Pay.

As for WWAN and others, the 5-inch iPhone will carry the Qualcomm Mobile Data Modem (MDM) MDM9625M chipset and RF WTR1625L transceiver as found on the iPhone 6 with the Broadcom BCM5897 and Texas Instruments (TI) 343S0645 touchscreen controllers as found on the iPhone 5s.

What's new in the iPhone SE?

As a Frankenstein of old and new, the iPhone SE utilizes some original components including the TI 338S00170 power manager, multi-band and multi-mode Power Amplifier Modules (PAM) for quad-band GPRS, A Skyworks SKY77611 chipset for EDGE/3G/4G, Toshiba THGBX5G7D2KLDXG NAND flash storage, Epcos D5255 antenna, and a 0DALM1 microphone from AAC Technologies.

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