TSMC May Win Bulk of A9 Orders Due to Better Production Yield

name99 said:

All we know about A8 manufacturing is that TSMC makes 70% of them, and Samsung makes 30%.

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We do not know that. All we know is TSMC is the only confirmed manufacturer of the chip. There's no evidence whatsoever that Apple has another supplier for A8, nor have they done multi sourcing like that before for their chips.

For the same token, I remain skeptical about this article too. There's so much more rumbling about GlobalFoundries and Samsung making A9 this generation and it just feels so late for Apple to make the big switch.

Bahroo said:

Tbh hoping Samsung wins out here cause 14nm FINfet>>16 nm finfet

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TSMC has finFET+

http://www.kitguru.net/components/g...f-chips-for-nvidia-mediatek-lg-xilinx-others/

and apparently the sweetspot is around 20-22nm. (cost to performance ratio; smaller processes the higher cost and bigger temperature issue)
Apple might even have its A9 chips stay at 20nm processes

Apple will still have A9 manufactured with Samsung and TSMC because this is the best business strategy. With TSMC's high pricing (they do have the best yield in the market) and its limited volume available for Apple, I doubt that TSMC would produce ALL the A9 chips.

inscrewtable said:

Sorry mate, if you don't understand colloquial use of the English language then I'm afraid you'll just have to follow me all over macrumors and make corrections.

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I know what you meant, I still just don't like it. It's 2015, so, I'll just wait for Doc Brown, steal his car and go back in time and fix English...

MacBH928 said:

They already started producing A9s? iPhone 6 still scarce to find around here!

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Yeah, makes you wonder if something that needs the A9 is coming in the 1st half of 2015.

GenesisST said:

I know what you meant, I still just don't like it. It's 2015, so, I'll just wait for Doc Brown, steal his car and go back in time and fix English...

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Having said that I do wonder what your original objection really is if it did include you. Isn't it the case that most people who appreciate Apple products, (and I guess that would include everyone on an Apple rumours site apart from trolls) do not wish to see a company like samsung blatently steal software and hardware design from Apple. Yet there are some Samsung haters who suggest rather silly things that Apple should do to Samsung that would be illogical and bad for business.

For example shifting to TSMC when they weren't ready, just to spite Samsung. In the end purchasers of Apple products would obviously prefer that Apple use the best most reliable components available, given the choice.

However because Samsung has resorted to blatant thievery and questionable business practices, they deserve to be given short shrift by Apple and if Apple can funnel money away from Samsung while replacing them with a better product, if it were possible, then surely that is a good thing, is it not?

And if you think it is not, tell me why not.

dampfnudel said:

Yeah, makes you wonder if something that needs the A9 is coming in the 1st half of 2015.

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Doubt it. Latter half, more likely. They have to get their ducks in a row regarding building the chip long before products are ready.

inscrewtable said:

Having said that I do wonder what your original objection really is if it did include you. Isn't it the case that most people who appreciate Apple products, (and I guess that would include everyone on an Apple rumours site apart from trolls) do not wish to see a company like samsung blatently steal software and hardware design from Apple. Yet there are some Samsung haters who suggest rather silly things that Apple should do to Samsung that would be illogical and bad for business.

For example shifting to TSMC when they weren't ready, just to spite Samsung. In the end purchasers of Apple products would obviously prefer that Apple use the best most reliable components available, given the choice.

However because Samsung has resorted to blatant thievery and questionable business practices, they deserve to be given short shrift by Apple and if Apple can funnel money away from Samsung while replacing them with a better product, if it were possible, then surely that is a good thing, is it not?

And if you think it is not, tell me why not.

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My intention was to mention that I do not wish ill on Samsung (nor that I wish them good either). I do appreciate my Apple products, but not to the point of hating everything else.

If Samsung's phone division blatantly copies the iPhone, nothing I say will change that nor defend Apple. In short, I don't have emotions in regards to this.

Yet, I do let emotions respond regarding my lack of emotions sometimes... :-D

Also, these forums seem quite polarized sometimes. But then again, so is everything these days, like politics... But let's not got there...

Michael Goff said:

If you think Samsung decides how good their SoC are based on Apple, you're kidding yourself.

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Cool story bro... I outlined a clear competitive advantage and reason why Samsung aren't a good logical business partner for Apple.

Actual or perceived conflict of interest, you choose. Either way, Apple has already spoken on the matter.

djgamble said:

Cool story bro... I outlined a clear competitive advantage and reason why Samsung aren't a good logical business partner for Apple.

Actual or perceived conflict of interest, you choose. Either way, Apple has already spoken on the matter.

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Except your advantage that you list out makes no sense. It only does if you're paranoid, or if you want to pretend Samsung can't make their own decisions.

Michael Goff said:

Except your advantage that you list out makes no sense. It only does if you're paranoid, or if you want to pretend Samsung can't make their own decisions.

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Paranoid? Put it outside of the Apple/Samsung context.

A company supplies exotic ingredients to a local icecream shop. That icecream shop is popular because it has those exotic ingredients and they mix them together in a certain way.

One day the supplier (who has never competed with them) opens up a shop next door to them on the main street with the SAME ingredients (but at lower prices because they use a lower grade icecream), they use similar signage and they go head to head with commercials saying 'OUR ICECREAM IS BETTER!!! SWITCH TODAY!!!'

Previously the first icecream shop had a trustworthy supplier and they could communicate on a deeper level. For example when inventing new flavours of icecream they'd say 'hey you have this ingredient... we're thinking about mixing it with THIS icecream... can you prepare your ingredient in a different way so that we can mix the two together?' Now... whenever that happens, the new icecream shop magically starts producing icecream similar to what the first shop is researching and they have a big sign our front saying SHOP 1 COPIES US!!! WE THOUGHT OF THIS ICECREAM FIRST!!!

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Since the two companies are competing in an area where they previously cooperated for mutual benefit... it's not paranoid, it's logical for shop 1 to sever their dependency on their supplier. Instead they can find a supplier who isn't actively trying to out-sell them and claim that they're copying their ideas (although everybody in town knows that the first shop has been selling exotic icecreams for decades and they have a home name for flavour/innovation around town that they have built up over years).

djgamble said:

Paranoid? Put it outside of the Apple/Samsung context.

A company supplies exotic ingredients to a local icecream shop. That icecream shop is popular because it has those exotic ingredients and they mix them together in a certain way.

One day the supplier (who has never competed with them) opens up a shop next door to them on the main street with the SAME ingredients (but at lower prices because they use a lower grade icecream), they use similar signage and they go head to head with commercials saying 'OUR ICECREAM IS BETTER!!! SWITCH TODAY!!!'

Previously the first icecream shop had a trustworthy supplier and they could communicate on a deeper level. For example when inventing new flavours of icecream they'd say 'hey you have this ingredient... we're thinking about mixing it with THIS icecream... can you prepare your ingredient in a different way so that we can mix the two together?' Now... whenever that happens, the new icecream shop magically starts producing icecream similar to what the first shop is researching and they have a big sign our front saying SHOP 1 COPIES US!!! WE THOUGHT OF THIS ICECREAM FIRST!!!

---

Since the two companies are competing in an area where they previously cooperated for mutual benefit... it's not paranoid, it's logical for shop 1 to sever their dependency on their supplier. Instead they can find a supplier who isn't actively trying to out-sell them and claim that they're copying their ideas (although everybody in town knows that the first shop has been selling exotic icecreams for decades and they have a home name for flavour/innovation around town that they have built up over years).

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Except Samsung uses a different philosophy for their phones. Their processors are different, their screens are different. I seriously don't get why people seem to post this type of thing. The Exynos Processor is nothing like the AX processor. One of them is focused on the 'more cores and faster' philosophy and the other is focused on the 'be more efficient with fewer cores and lower speed' philosophy. They're not even trying to be the same.

If you get an S5 confused with an iPhone 6, you might have vision problems.

Michael Goff said:

One of them is focused on the 'more cores and faster' philosophy and the other is focused on the 'be more efficient with fewer cores and lower speed' philosophy.

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Uuuum... but Apple's phones are faster? With less cores? There's clear

Michael Goff said:

I seriously don't get why people seem to post this type of thing.

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I think you need to have a beer and think about it. I've tried analogizing and your only argument is that slight design differences and different specs of ARM CPUs create a situation where the two companies are competing in different markets and there's no conflict of interest using Samsung as a parts manufacturer.

My first comment to that is that Samsung clearly target their ads at Apple and it's pretty clear that they're selling similar products in the same marketplace.





Secondly...

Apple are clearly of the opinion that Samsung copies them if you bother to read some of this litigation, so it really doesn't matter whether or not you on this matter. It's what Apple thinks because they're the ones making these decisions! They see Samsung as a competitor... they're litigating against them and have clearly been looking into alternatives to their (admittedly high quality) ARM manufacturing facility. The only reason they haven't left sooner is that others can't make the same quantity of chips in the time needed, with the same yields. Currently, the majority of the current ARM chips used by Apple are now made elsewhere and Apple's clearly researching ways of not being dependent on Samsung's chips.

Using Samsung's chips is bankrolling a war against Apple's flagship phones/tablets (with Samsung spending billions of dollars on 'don't buy Apple gear' campaigns). Samsung has been an irritating thorn in Apple's foot for some time and I think they are particularly good business partners... although, they 'get along' sometimes when it's mutually beneficial.

djgamble said:

Uuuum... but Apple's phones are faster? With less cores? There's clear

Image



I think you need to have a beer and think about it. I've tried analogizing and your only argument is that slight design differences and different specs of ARM CPUs create a situation where the two companies are competing in different markets and there's no conflict of interest using Samsung as a parts manufacturer.

My first comment to that is that Samsung clearly target their ads at Apple and it's pretty clear that they're selling similar products in the same marketplace.

Image

Image

Secondly...

Apple are clearly of the opinion that Samsung copies them if you bother to read some of this litigation, so it really doesn't matter whether or not you on this matter. It's what Apple thinks because they're the ones making these decisions! They see Samsung as a competitor... they're litigating against them and have clearly been looking into alternatives to their (admittedly high quality) ARM manufacturing facility. The only reason they haven't left sooner is that others can't make the same quantity of chips in the time needed, with the same yields. Currently, the majority of the current ARM chips used by Apple are now made elsewhere and Apple's clearly researching ways of not being dependent on Samsung's chips.

Using Samsung's chips is bankrolling a war against Apple's flagship phones/tablets (with Samsung spending billions of dollars on 'don't buy Apple gear' campaigns). Samsung has been an irritating thorn in Apple's foot for some time and I think they are particularly good business partners... although, they 'get along' sometimes when it's mutually beneficial.

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A) Yes, but the clock speeds are what I'm talking about.
B) Slight design differences? Pretty much everything about their phones are different.
C) Technically, until they make their own chips? They're always going to be funding somebody who is competition at some level. Even TSMC is their competition, since they're the people yet make those chips in just about every mobile device out there. Type wise, obviously. Yep, they make Snapdragon and Tegra. Without them, Qualcomm would be up a creek.

Rumor has it that tsmc can't even get 20nm snapdragon 810 running right while Samsung is using a57 cores in the Korean note 4

groovyd said:

I like how people on here talk about 'tape-outs' like they know more about it then they might have read off wikipedia maybe once if at all. ok, so lets assume this cumbersome process indeed costs 100m... does this even matter to them? We are talking about billions in sales here. To not spend an extra buck per unit to diversify your supplier seems a bit naive for a company that has been through the ropes a few dozen times already. A bit save the penny to lose the dime so to speak. Of course they have both companies fully ramping up no matter what the process involves. This isn't a dozen chicklets they are selling here, it is hundreds of millions of devices around the entire world... LOL

As a side note I have done microprocessor design at the transistor level and none of this push to manufacturing is really very difficult to do once the manufacturers themselves have a process that they already know to work which happens well before any of these negotiations even begin to occur. Sure yields will change as they refine their methods. For the most part porting a logic design into a particular layout is nowadays mostly automated, push go, sleep tight, wake up the next morning and you have your masks ready to go. Couple niggling timing issues, hand route a few bits here and there and spin.

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Firstly, if only it was actually that simple, quick & cheap...

I worked in the semiconductor industry in the early-mid 90s. As a designer in fine granularity CMOS FPGAs.

And I'm working in it now. Other than feature sizes, not a lot has fundamentally changed. Tools are better at doing what they do. And yet the same challenges still remain. When I started out 20+ years ago, we were playing with a few million transistors. Now it is billions. The complexity is a much bigger deal, so even though the tools got better, they're having to deal with exponentially increasing complexity when it comes to testing, manufacturing, simulations etc... it takes TIME! And time is money...

Anyway, so imagine you're the product/engineering manager, and your team gets something wrong - for what ever reason...

1 - That's $100 million wasted. With your name on it. How many of these will your career survive?
2 - That's now a delay on the product release while a new mask set is made, and then new wafers manufactured - that will be MONTHS.

Where are the billions in profitable sales coming from if you're late? In many fast moving consumer goods markets there is very little margin for error. If you miss the release to market date, you won't recover on margins, even if you do get to play, because end prices drop and margins get eroded. It's quite a savage drop off in margins. And it's these margins that fund R&D expenditure and related investments. It can quickly become a death spiral, so 1 or 2 misses might mean skipping out that entire round or product, so now you need to jump ahead to get ready for the next cycle - and you have a tougher job now because your reputation took a bit of a hit, as well as your financials... Don't tell me the impacts here are inconsequential.

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djgamble said:

Cool story bro... I outlined a clear competitive advantage and reason why Samsung aren't a good logical business partner for Apple.

Actual or perceived conflict of interest, you choose. Either way, Apple has already spoken on the matter.

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This is likely to be the case only if you look at Samsung as a single entity. Samsung's chip manufacturing and it's phone manufacturing & product divisions are quite separate, to the point where you can be best buddies with one, and dire enemies with the other, and that's OK.

Is it just me or does this rumor seem to change back and forth almost daily?