The other day I told you that inside the new Apple TV 3.2 hides an improved A5 chip, produced using a new manufacturing process. Well, the Chipwoks succeeded to scan the chip, and inside it they found the same single-core processor, the same video cores, but a different method of arranging the analog circuits. Although the previous version of the A5 chip was larger and included a processor with two cores, one disabled, this version contains only one core, and Apple seems to have improved the analog components to reduce the dimensions.
My guess is that the analog sections have been re-designed, always a work in progress when we get this small, since analog circuitry does not shrink anywhere near as predictably as digital. And as Jim said earlier, we think this is now in a mixed-signal version of the 32-nm process that allows extra passive components such as resistors, capacitors, and inductors, that is much more suited to analog stuff.
Despite the discovery of these changes, for now no one knows how Apple managed to halve the size of its chip without changing the 32nm manufacturing process. Probably in the next period we will find out more and more information related to this A5 chip in Apple TV 3.2, but most of the information will be assumptions because Apple will not tell the whole world how it managed to modify the components in such a way.
