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iPad Mini Confirmed to Run 32-Nanometer A5 Chip from Samsung
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For those of you who don't read the fine print on the articles that get published here, Samsung, nor Apple dropped anyone. They couldn't come to terms on price because Samsung needed to get more margins to offset the USD currency crash (evidenced by a doubling of prices for food, fuel, metals) by D-FEDGOV deficit spending, and to cover the increased labor costs in Asia (^15% annually). Apple tried to compress those costs and they came to an impasse.
Apple also is tightly controlling costs on their remaining suppliers who are lucky if they have 10% margins.
I think Samsung is an evil, unethical copycat, and is good at it, but they are also at the same time, a world class quality manufacturer with massive capacity.
They are the ones starting the war based on specs and price, not winning the war based on overall device capability and value.
When consumers pick sides in that war they are funding their "team". Choose wisely not blindly.
Rocketman
Apple also is tightly controlling costs on their remaining suppliers who are lucky if they have 10% margins.
I think Samsung is an evil, unethical copycat, and is good at it, but they are also at the same time, a world class quality manufacturer with massive capacity.
They are the ones starting the war based on specs and price, not winning the war based on overall device capability and value.
When consumers pick sides in that war they are funding their "team". Choose wisely not blindly.
Rocketman
The chart you link to excludes foundries and ranks them by sales revenues that include the markup normally associated with the designs themselves. Therefore is not a counterargument to Prallethrin's comment that Samsung's foundry business is tiny behind TSMC and GF.
In fact, there's companies in that list who don't have any manufacturing capabilities at all.
Seriously, everybody in the semiconductor industry knows that the big players in semiconductor manufacturing are Intel, TSMC, UMC, and GF.
the apple fanboys in this site are worse than the editors on the verge.
TSMC is known for some of the absolutely worst yields on new fabs <32nm. Good riddance to Samsung? Have fun with inferior screens, defective memory/mainboards, and a slew of other problems.
TSMC is known for some of the absolutely worst yields on new fabs <32nm. Good riddance to Samsung? Have fun with inferior screens, defective memory/mainboards, and a slew of other problems.
Um.
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPad+Mini+Teardown/11423/3
Screen = panel unknown, driver is from Samsung.
Ram = unknown. Most likely Elpida. (Micron uses MT prefix, Nanya uses N-something, Samsung uses K. Can't think of who else makes LPDDR2)
CPU = Apple/Samsung
Flash = Hynix
You hear about TSMC's "low yields" because nVidia complains so much. Yeah, 28nm is difficult. But it's nowhere near as bad as what you read in the media. nVidia is a special case where low yields are expected by engineers because their die size is freakin' huge.
Samsung has great yields for 28nm and the only reason for that is that they dedicate a significant amount of their manufacturing resources to their memory business. Memory is a pretty uniform structure, so it's the easiest and cheapest way to refine process. If your product has manufacturing errors, you simply mark it as a smaller sized pieces of memory and still sell it. Intel does the same.
TSMC's equivalent testbed is FPGAs (Altera, Xilinx) which are also relatively uniform, but nowhere near the volume as memory.
sorry you are right, i was looking at a diffrent article, the iphone 4s matches my description, the ipad is diffrent
Yet they showcased it and compared it to 7'' tablets at the conference. Come on man. Obviously they are in competition with the 7'' tablets
There's something ironic about Apple suing Samsung for copying the 'look' of its iPhone/iPad devices (clearly are not the same given the totally difference operating system) when Apple uses Samsung chips to makes those same devices work.... 
One can't help but wonder what would happen if Samsung simply refused to sell its chips to Apple at this point or pulled them from the market entirely to make a point.
One can't help but wonder what would happen if Samsung simply refused to sell its chips to Apple at this point or pulled them from the market entirely to make a point.