Oh my. Cue the people who will exchange one dozen times and still not be happy with their replacement. I feel bad for the employees that have to deal with this insanity.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
iPhone 6s Uses Different-Sized A9 Chips From Samsung and TSMC
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Oh my. Cue the people who will exchange one dozen times and still not be happy with their replacement. I feel bad for the employees that have to deal with this insanity.
Did anybody else notice on iFixit teardowns that the APL0898 is in the 6s and the APL1022 is in the 6s Plus? The smaller chip in the smaller phone, bigger chip in the bigger of the two..
Whichever the worst one is, I don't have it.
When extensive research has been made on both versions of the chips and if the results say that the smaller version is even slightly better at performance and/or efficiency, then I wouldn't blame the customers for wanting to exchange. But that doesn't mean I wouldn't feel bad for the employees as well.
At most there would be a few percent difference in performance between the chips, so I'm going to go with NOTHING.
This would have been funny, except for the part where Half Life 2 was confirmed in 2003.
Or maybe more likely you got a different config, different apps running in backgroup, etc.
If anything, Apple would have clocked down the TSMC one (so it would be slightly slower by a few percent), so the temp would be pretty similar on both.
I also think TSMC's process is not exactly the same as Samsung (so, size is not the only difference). It's not as straight forward an assessment as it may seem just looking at the sizes.
You do you Apple has pretty decent engineers who know what they're doing hey.
Seriously, there's going to be whining about this, like everything else. Depressing really.
Last edited:
OMG, how do I open up my brand new 6S and verify what chip I have???? I hopes I have the bestest chip. Imma be so made at Apple if I got boned!!!!!!1
whats funny is that the people who actually cares about this, are the ones who just texts and make phone calls here an there, with maybe some occasional web browsing/youtubing/and candy crush gaming, yet they will act like they need incremental performance enhancements for their oh soo performance throbbing tasks..
This is why they can't even walk like humans properly and people are worried about Terminator becoming real life, pah!
Tell me about it. God forbid people spending $700+ on a device demand that they're receiving the same performing device as everyone else.
If you're going to use different suppliers (which is almost mandatory), make sure both parts are identical (not physically, but performance wise). If one outperforms the other, it's unacceptable and I dare say unethical in my opinion.
I guess we'll soon find out if this is a real issue when they start testing the two against each other.
Screen quality, yes that did concern me in the past, but I can't imagine these chip sizes (other than perhaps a very minor battery-life edge for Samsung's 14nm chip) would produce a noticeable speed difference amongst iPhones with distinct silicon. My wild guess would be the 'larger' chip to end up in the 6s Plus, because of the extra room, but at this point that's all it is, conjecture.
The only evidence thusfar is just that, one speculation is that the 6s+ has more room for heat dissipation, so it would go there. I hope that's the case (that one fab'd chip goes in only one of the 2 models) just because I don't want to hear about this for the next 12 months
Correct! A few Chinese sites have noticed this as well. the APL0898 is the 14nm process according to its datasheet.
This is exactly the problem here! I have a nephew that constantly brags that his phone's "XLTE" is so much faster than mine. And he's right, speedtest.net shows that I average about 30x30 and he averages about 90x50. He has let to show me a use for that.
This "ChipGate" is stupid. The only case I can see here is if one gets a noticeable increase in battery life.
I get the same issues with my 6s and not with my 6 ..
when I unlock the 6s the screen freezes for 3/5 seconds before I can select apps...
also running a game for 10 min my iphone heats up so bad I have to stop playing as it starts to burn my hand .. I may need to visit an apple store for this as my iphone 6 does not have these issues
Please just return your 6s and switch to a different phone please
Joke of course. But wouldn't be surprised if some money grubbing lawyer wanted to try
How on earth do you even know one performs less than the other. THEY DIDN'T EVEN SAY ANYTHING THAT. They're specialists and even them aren't sure about it. They want to test them!
Is this a preemptive rant session? Seems like it...
Considering chips must run in the same phone, it's probable that thermal constraints have led to both chips being tuned to perform pretty much the same (within a margin of error). You know engineers can do that don't you?
I wouldn't be surprised if this tuning is the reason why clock rate tested in Geekbench have varied so much.
There are small variance even of processors on the same process from the same fab.
Last edited: