Apple and TSMC Reportedly Completing Designs for 20-nm A7 Chip With Early 2014 Availability

[chrmjenkins]

Any rumours on Apple licensing capacity off Intel? Global Foundries (formally the fab division of AMD) might also be a partner in the future given the rumours not too long ago regarding Apple employees around the AMD campus.

Problem is that Intel wants to increase its level of involvement in the mobile space with Atom and Mefield etc platforms. Licensing their fabs to ARM licensees doesn't really help that overall goal. Intel could sell a ton of fab capacity to a lot of players if they wanted to. They don't want to because it's not in their ultimate best interest.

GloFo is interesting in their development of a FD-SOI process (which some argue all silicon has to go to eventually to continue scaling), but publicly known die sizes suggest that TSMC is actually quite denser on a given process than GloFo, Samsung et al. TSMC is really Apple's best option.

 

[MrNomNoms]

Problem is that Intel wants to increase its level of involvement in the mobile space with Atom and Mefield etc platforms. Licensing their fabs to ARM licensees doesn't really help that overall goal. Intel could sell a ton of fab capacity to a lot of players if they wanted to. They don't want to because it's not in their ultimate best interest.

GloFo is interesting in their development of a FD-SOI process (which some argue all silicon has to go to eventually to continue scaling), but publicly known die sizes suggest that TSMC is actually quite denser on a given process than GloFo, Samsung et al. TSMC is really Apple's best option.

Thank you for the correction - my understanding was that Intel wanted to be more or less a blind supplier of capacity but I could see the conflict of interests by supplying capacity to a competitors product that would undermine their own mobile strategy. It will be interesting to see how the Intel mobile CPU's perform once a mature Android emerges along with support from Microsoft - it seems that Intel is doing the 'x86 everywhere' vision which AMD announced almost 5 years ago IIRC.

 

[chrmjenkins]

Thank you for the correction - my understanding was that Intel wanted to be more or less a blind supplier of capacity but I could see the conflict of interests by supplying capacity to a competitors product that would undermine their own mobile strategy. It will be interesting to see how the Intel mobile CPU's perform once a mature Android emerges along with support from Microsoft - it seems that Intel is doing the 'x86 everywhere' vision which AMD announced almost 5 years ago IIRC.

Medfield has pulled them even and it's not even 22nm. It's going to get interesting if they can get traction. Problem for them is that SoC business is race to the bottom and they're a high margin consumer IC supplier comparatively.

 

[cube]

I was hoping for an A7 iPad soon, but I guess if it is 28nm, it's skipping time again.