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How TSMC Won Back Exclusivity With Apple for the A10 Chip in iPhone 7
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This. People always say "Samsung won't notice - they have other customers to take up the production capacity if Apple moves to someone else." They're forgetting two important things:
- What other mobile device manufacturer is ordering 300+ million high-end processors per year?
- And as mentioned above, any production that moves from Samsung to TSMC means less R&D money for Samsung and more for TSMC (one of their primary competitors). It's never good to see billions of dollars in business go to a competitor.
Did Samsung stop making Qualcomm's high-end SOCs?
Samsung Semi's 2Q sales are up 6% (YoY) and 8% (QoQ), so despite Apple's recent dramatic decline, the company is doing well -- a sign that the division doesn't depend on Apple sales.
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The 6s already use a 16nm process from TSMC or 14nm from Samsung. And the 16nm from TSMC already proved to be better than the 14nm from Samsung.
Nah, I doubt Apple is run by a bunch of petulant 12 year old's. Or maybe they are. Even if it's true that TSMC is better, it'd not be too surprising -- TSMC practically created the fab outsourcing business in the 80's and is nearly 2 decades ahead of Samsung. But what's even more surprising is that the new entrant Samsung is competing neck and neck with TSMC on the latest cutting edge node.
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With the chip improvements I FINALLY had to upgrade my old iPad. My old iPad had remained my stable nightstand companion as it could stream video and surf the web like a champ, but when it couldn't handle the software i was using on my newer iPhone like photo editing it was finally time to upgrade.
Hopefully more and more software developers take advantage of this on the iPad to make it a more invaluable tool instead of just a Netflix and surfing device.
Hopefully more and more software developers take advantage of this on the iPad to make it a more invaluable tool instead of just a Netflix and surfing device.
The thermal advantages to this design may well be 20%, but that isn't equal to a full node shrink.
Somewhere Jony Ive is tenting his fingers and laughing maniacally, imagining industrial calipers with the needle approaching zero.
Let's face it, Apple doesn't want Samsung making their chips. Apple doesn't want Samsung manufacturing anything they put in their devices.
The fact that this doesn't have more up votes is appalling.Great article. I give it A10/10
- Samsung Semi comprises a LOT of different components besides SoC's. You have no idea if the YoY growth is due to Qualcomm or something completely different.
- Apple never suffered a dramatic decline - they had an unusually higher than normal performance in the last 2 year ago quarters.
- Apple sells more flagship devices than Samsung, Motorola, LG, HTC and Motorola combined that would use a state-of-the-art processor like the 820. Losing Apple is like losing 50% of your high-end production.
- I never said they depended on Apple sales. I said losing billions in revenue is a big deal, especially if that revenue goes directly into the pockets of your biggest competitor.
Apple doesn't care who makes their processors. As long as they can follow directions and make them to Apples specifications in the quantity Apple needs. If TSMC gets 100% of Apple orders for the next A10 processor it will be because TSMC is providing a better product.
I respectfully disagree. If all things were equal they would chose TSMC. TSMC makes a good enough chip but they could never handle keeping up with a mega iPhone order. Samsung could. Apple expects the manufacturer to follow their spec qualifications but there is more to their decision.
It was poorly written!I didn't understand much of the article
Apple read the TSMC v Samsung chipset complaints here and immediately knew who exclusivity would be awarded to.
Maybe not but it is better than some of the process shrinks Intwl went through. In any event to me that isn't the important thing, the important thing is that we are getting improvements without process shrinks. Realistically we only have a few, maybe even a couple, of process shrinks left for the current technology approaches. So gains like this between process shrinks are very welcomed indeed.
Combine a new process like this with additional architecture improvements from Apple and we might see a real world 20% increase in CPU performance. Why only 20%, mainly because things like improved caching has a negative impact on thermals, not all of the thermal improvements in the packaging system will translate directly into gains in performance. It really depends upon how aggressive Apple will be in this spin of the processor architecture. If there is room for thermal improvement, in the SOC architecture, we could see them going beyond 30% but Apple chips are already pretty aggressive thermally.
Interestingly what I see happening is that greater bandwidth to RAM will benefit the GPU substantially. On most of the so called APU designs out there the biggest performance problem isn't the GPU cores but their ability to get to RAM. People may be in for a surprise in this respect.
