It's really not important. Just fodder for geeks like myself, who enjoy reading such technical breakdowns and analysis.
Oh, and some fanboys find certain aspects threatening to their iPad 2, so they get upset and start acting stupid.
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Chip Teardown Firms Confirm iPad 2's A5 Chip Manufactured by Samsung
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It's really not important. Just fodder for geeks like myself, who enjoy reading such technical breakdowns and analysis.
Oh, and some fanboys find certain aspects threatening to their iPad 2, so they get upset and start acting stupid.
In many ways.
1) production capacity. Say fab companies start having trouble with their 45nm processes. If this affects TSMC but not Samsung, Apple will not be affected.
2) Competitor as a supplier. There's probably an interesting dynamic in that samsung directly supplies a competitor to its products in the tablet and smartphone markets. This may influence their price they offer to Apple.
3) We know where Apple's some 7 billion went to with Samsung. A good part of it is likely these SoCs.
4) Stock prices. Samsung's likely goes up and any samsung news could affect Apple's.
It's valuable business information to know a chip's manufacturing process, foundry, capabilities and so forth.
Imaging / decapping chips has been going on forever. Taking apart your competition's technology is very common in some fields. Even more so between countries, especially during the Cold War.
A not-really-related technology stunt story told in the intelligence community: back in the 1960s East German Intelligence deliberately let the West obtain an extremely fine piece of wire, just to demonstrate that their technology was pretty darned good even under Communism. The West Germans carefully bored an even finer hole down the inside of the wire, creating the world's smallest metal tube... and nonchalantly returned it to their Iron Curtain counterparts.
A not-really-related technology stunt story told in the intelligence community: back in the 1960s East German Intelligence deliberately let the West obtain an extremely fine piece of wire, just to demonstrate that their technology was pretty darned good even under Communism. The West Germans carefully bored an even finer hole down the inside of the wire, creating the world's smallest metal tube... and nonchalantly returned it to their Iron Curtain counterparts.
Awesome. Reference?
I was in the intelligence business for six years (ASA - the military branch of NSA)... like many others, I have some incredible stories that can't be told... but in this case the source was much more mundane:
Popular Science, sometime in the 1970s. Sorry, can't recall any closer
How come some people want to keep defending Apple's claim of 1 ghz when it's been consistently around 890 mhz? Benchmarks are supposed to bring out the full potential of the hardware, there's no reason to "downclock" for that, but for some reason go up to 1 ghz when doing other things. The 1st ipad was determined to be 1 ghz, and it shows.
Even if the A5 is dual ~900 mhz cores, it's still really good, I get why there is a need for apologists to defend something when there are hard facts.
This wouldn't be the first time Apple's underclocked/throttled and attempted to hide it. Macbook Air anyone?
http://www.iosnoops.com/2011/03/11/apple-a5-processor-two-cores-but-clocked-slower-than-a4/
Even if the A5 is dual ~900 mhz cores, it's still really good, I get why there is a need for apologists to defend something when there are hard facts.
This wouldn't be the first time Apple's underclocked/throttled and attempted to hide it. Macbook Air anyone?
http://www.iosnoops.com/2011/03/11/apple-a5-processor-two-cores-but-clocked-slower-than-a4/
Me too, Schottky Field Emitter please with an SDD EDS detector and a Magnaray WDS detector.
JEOL is in Akishima, west of Tokyo so they are suffering the hit to the infrastructure but were not badly damaged.
http://www.jeolusa.com/HOME/JapanAlert/tabid/798/Default.aspx
I'm more worried about Hitachi. They are in Hitachinaka (used to be Katsuta) in Ibaraki which is closer to the epicenter than Tokyo. I've heard from people in the area that they are OK, but suffered a lot of shaking. Hitachi's response is here:
http://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/110314.html
They don't mention Naka but it is in the same area along the Joban line as the factories they mention.
"At this scale even electron microscopes start to run out of steam,"
Ha. They need a better electron microscope. I've seen people using thin sections with an S-5500 get carbon lattice images.
It's been told many times but what one dept of Samsung does with Apple doesn't always benefit another dept of Samsung favorably. Each dept acts as a separate company. So if Samsung Electronics wants to sell A4/A5 to Apple at say $20/each, Samsung Mobile doesn't necessarily get same or better terms. Samsung Mobile may have to go to a 3rd party to get their components.
1) Because Apple is exposed to law suits if the lie. To share holders and to customers. And Apple is stating 1 GHz.
2) Why should we take for grated that Geekbench is telling the truth? This is the first time that tool is experiencing this aggressive clock skewing, and I'd be surprised if they got it right.
3) The benchmark could be a mean of some instructions, several peaks at 1 GHz, and some are more mundane so the chip down clocks itself, the result is varied around 900 Mhz.
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chipworks - cool - how much did that electron scope cost and what mag are you using?
also of interest is the word "decap" used in the article - like decapitating the top of a chip - cool
i used to work in semi industry back in the day
also of interest is the word "decap" used in the article - like decapitating the top of a chip - cool
i used to work in semi industry back in the day
Hard to tell what mag was used without seeing the micron marker. I'm guessing the smaller features are about a micron so the field of view is 50 microns or so which is referenced to a 10 cm display crt yielding a mag of about 2,000x give or take.
Roughly speaking there are two classes of SEMs; tungsten gun and field emission guns. Tungsten SEMs cost roughly $200k, depending on options and maker and and the FE SEMs cost roughly $450 to $600k depending on options and such. Specialized FE SEMs run up to nearly $1M. Very specialized SEMs used in the semiconductor area probably cost several million each.
I think decap comes from de-encapsulating which means to remove the protective packaging. Lately I've seen people do this by polishing down to the active layers. The micrograph on page one of this forum looks like they just cut it in half and polished it smooth.
Clearly I'm out of the loop here, so maybe someone could explain this to me... I thought Apple purchased PA Semi so they could manufacture their own chips. Where do they fit into the equation?
PA Semi was a fabless company, like the vast majority of the industry. This means they use a third party's library and process to design their chips. They don't directly manufacture them.
Library as I understand it is a loose term. However you look at it, they're using the fab house's transistor models.
Yes - they presumably use the fab's transistor models (though they may model the transistors themselves, too). They certainly use the fab's process.
A library is a collection of cells (for example, logical gates, RAM cells, etc.) in various sizes and configurations. Typically a fab will provide a library. High-end design teams tend to design their own, optimized for their own design.
I'd say roughly speaking there are three: Tungsten, LaB6, and FEG. Your low end estimate is too high by a factor of four. I have a LaB6 (actually CeBix) SEM sitting under my desk at home (never thought I'd be able to drop that line in a conversation and still be on topic
). See here for details. Your $200K gets you three of those with money left for an iPad 2 and a small car.To make this even more on-topic: I can control this SEM from my iPhone - how cool is that?
Wrong assumptions there.
Apple does NOT manufacture anything on their own. They may design but manufacturing is outsourced to companies in Taiwan/China (or all in China).
Yes I'm quite well aware of it. A4/A5 are made in South Korea by samsung. But ipad/iphones are actually assembled in china by chinese companies. Hence my comment that Apple doesn't actually manufacture anything.
Yes. That part of your statement was correct. But not the part about China (particularly since the question you were responding to had to do with the A4/A5).
congrats on feeling the need to point that out more than once.
I guess for some people the need to be "right" gets them through the day.