Design
The A8 is manufactured on a 20 nm process[4] by TSMC[1] which is a departure from previous processors for Apples mobile devices which was manufactured by Samsung. It contains 2 billion transistors. Despite that being double the amount of transistors compared to the A7, its physical size has been reduced by 13% to 89 mm2 (consistent with a shrink only, not know to be a new microarchitecture).[5] It has 1 GB of LPDDR3 RAM included in the package.[3][8]
Early benchmarking using the Geekbench application suggests that the processor is dual core, and has a frequency of 1.4 GHz. It also supports Apple's claim of it being 25% faster than the A7.[3]