TSMC Begins Trial Manufacturing of Apple A6 Processors

[mdriftmeyer]

It was reported almost 3 weeks ago that Apple got back test wafers from TSMC
on the site SemiAccurate.
Test wafers is a complete different thing than full scale production.

TSMC revenue will be 3% 28 nanometer last quarter this year. This is from manufacturing mostly AMD 7 series graphic and Nvidia 6 series graphic. Nvidia/AMD has booked wafers years back. It is hard to see Apple just waltzing in and take wafers from other companies.

If TSMC is going to mass produce Apple chips soon, it won't be an 28nm A6. That won't be ready until next year.

We could see an A5+ on 40nm. Higher clock speeds and PowerVR 6 graphics. PowerVR6 was tape out six month ago, so it is perfectly times. PowerVR6 series graphic can drive a Retina 10inch display.

GlobalFoundries has a ton of new News:

http://www.globalfoundries.com/newsroom/

 

[verbalhijacker]

The Future?

'Unconfirmed' sources from Apple Outsider state that Apple will be harnessing the vast heat potential on the new A6 chip and incorporating that multiple docking devices that serve as accessories for the forthcoming iPhone 6.

Reports indicate that the iPhone 6 will function as heat element allowing it to be docked with accessoires such as iBurn, a radical new Toaster that uses the iPhone as its main component to heat toasties and paninis. But it doesn't stop there reports also state that a whole collection of accessories are already being lined up such as, ibottle(hot water bottle replacement) and most eagerly anticipated ibarbecue.

Officals at Apple have tried to contain their excitement with the new product, however Johnathan Chives, Chief Designer at Apple has commented that...

"With the iPhone 6, we took radical approach to create something truly magical and unique. Not only will your iPhone be a central communication and entertainment device but now you can cook and sleep with it!"

Speculation has grown in Europe as regards to the possibility that the iPhone 6 heat power to be harnessed in powering average consumer homes.
Professor Frodo Baggins from the University of Shropshire, England highlights that "the possibility of renewable energy is becoming a reality", confirming 'if what they say is true about this phone then we can finally rid the addiction we have with oil'.

Apple has cautiously stated that while European homes may be powered by the heat energy of the iPhone 6, such a feature will be disabled in the US due to the fact that individual energy consumption is x10 that of our Europeans friends, but a on high note Steve Yobs recently hinted in an email that although this feature is not available in the US, "iPhone 7, just you wait!" was enough for rumour sites to start speculation to what the potential the iPhone 7 will hold.

 

[alent1234]

what does everyone think the A6 might be. like just at a higher frequency than the A5 (maybe at 1.2 or 1.5 GHz). or does anyone think they might make a quad core (but that would kill battery). i just dont know what more they can add because they A5 is a really powerful chip.

depends on apple's licenses with samsung. A4 was an almost mirror image of the Samsung ARM CPU. not sure about A5, but i think it was as well.

with the A6 it will depend on apple licensing samsung's CPU architecture or someone else's

 

[rosalindavenue]

Yea, that would be great if Samsung went out of business. I'm hoping for the day when Apple is the only company on earth and and that one day it will make all consumer and industrial products. I'm talking cars, airplanes, supermarkets, gasoline, electricity, etc. Apple will have all of the money in the world, and then everyone here will finally be happy.

Amen. Samsung is a quality company; their LCD TVs are excellent; I'd take one over a Sony any day of the week. And from my experience their Apple components are high quality and trouble-free.

 

[*LTD*]

not really. You need to remember that the void Apple would leave for a client would be very easy to replace.

There is no other customer like Apple. Have you seen the news over the last few months?

If their biggest customer were so easily replaced they wouldn't be warning everyone of a major profit slump in their LCD business. Apple pulling out doesn't help matters. What other customer can match the level of insane demand for supplies that Apple brought to the table? Good luck finding one.

 

[jav6454]

No! Not TSMC... Apple will not get high yields from them. Why not GloFo instead? TSMC is responsible for the lack of GPUs in 2010. HD5000 series famine.

 

[deconstruct60]

As you know, Apple hardballs and plays tough and at the same time try to work with what they already have to make it work on their terms.

Yes they have been, but I think the Japanese Tsunami/Earthquake was a further wake up call to them. Many of the iOS products had single factory choke points in production. A single natural or man-made disaster at a single plant would wipe out their entire worldwide production of some products.

That is a silly position for a global Fortune 50 company with 10's of billions of cash to be in. Sometimes you can go too far being Scrooge McDuck and be penny wise and pound foolish.

They can still play hardball pitting the two suppliers against each other. They just have to stop playing the "winner gets it all" game.

 

[bruinsrme]

There is no other customer like Apple. Have you seen the news over the last few months?

If their biggest customer were so easily replaced they wouldn't be warning everyone of a major profit slump in their LCD business. Apple pulling out doesn't help matters. What other customer can match the level of insane demand for supplies that Apple brought to the table? Good luck finding one.

Samsung chip fabs are extremely flexible and can introduce new products quickly. Where companies once turned to TSMC they will find adequate manufacturing space with Samsung. TSMC seemed to be doing well without apple, as will Samsung.

 

[chrmjenkins]

The question is if TSMC is big enough and experienced enough to handle the same large quantities that Samsung is and has been handling.

If not, things could get ugly when demand for the next iSomething is high, and there's nothing in stock.

You're kidding, right? TSMC is the largest independent fab in the world. Bigger than GloFo. Bigger than Samsung (not independent).

Read their wikipedia overview.

Founded in 1987, TSMC is the world's first dedicated semiconductor foundry.[2] In addition to semiconductors, the company has also begun investing in lighting and solar energy-related industries.[2] It is listed on both the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange. Dr. Morris Chang serves as Chairman and CEO, while Dr. F.C. Tseng serves as Vice Chairman and Dr. Rick Tsai serves as President of New Businesses.[3]

Although TSMC offers a variety of wafer product-lines (high-voltage, mixed-signal, analog), TSMC is best known for its logic chip product line. Various fabless high-tech companies such as Applied Micro Circuits Corporation, Qualcomm, Altera, Broadcom, Conexant, Marvell, NVIDIA, and VIA are customers of TSMC. Some fab-owning companies like Intel also outsource some production to TSMC.[4] At least one semiconductor company, LSI Logic, re-sells TSMC wafers through its ASIC design services and design IP-portfolio.

TSMC's market capitalization reached a high in December 2010, reaching a value of NT$1.9 trillion (US$63.4 billion).[5] In 2011, the company plans to increase research and development expenditures by almost 39% to NT$50 billion in an effort to fend off growing competition.[6] The company also plans to expand capacity by 30% in 2011 to meet strong market demand.[7]

Has anyone paused to consider that Apple might be planning on using both TSMC and Samsung, because they need so many chips, and to diversify risk?

Diversify risk but also dispense of the meaning "in family." There's no way they'll spread the same chip across two foundries. When people do that, it's product lines they are doing it with (such as AMD spreading a GPU line across GloFo and TSMC).

It was reported almost 3 weeks ago that Apple got back test wafers from TSMC
on the site SemiAccurate.
Test wafers is a complete different thing than full scale production.

TSMC revenue will be 3% 28 nanometer last quarter this year. This is from manufacturing mostly AMD 7 series graphic and Nvidia 6 series graphic. Nvidia/AMD has booked wafers years back. It is hard to see Apple just waltzing in and take wafers from other companies.

If TSMC is going to mass produce Apple chips soon, it won't be an 28nm A6. That won't be ready until next year.

How convenient, Apple wouldn't need them until next year, in the march/april timeframe.

We could see an A5+ on 40nm. Higher clock speeds and PowerVR 6 graphics. PowerVR6 was tape out six month ago, so it is perfectly times. PowerVR6 series graphic can drive a Retina 10inch display.

I don't find that likely. I don't think PowerVR 6 will show up until A7 when we get Cortex A15 cores. Seems to me that A6 will be an A5 die shrink that focuses on higher clocks and lower energy consumption, just like A4 was kind of a die shrink of the 3GS processor (not directly since it added custom logic too).

 

[Thunderhawks]

depends, I would not exactly call Apple the best customer. From what I have been reading and Apple history seems to be gaining the reputation to chew up and spit out supplier. Not exactly the best reputation to earn ones self. You can sort of get away with it when you are top dog but when you fall from that perch it can and often times ugly because no one wants to work with you because of the reputation.
Now when could be 15-20 years from now but one thing is for sure Apple will be knock down from it. The top dog is always at some point kick off it is just a question of when. It would not be the first time nor the last time it happens to Apple.

Don't know where you are reading what. Cite a few examples please, instead of broad stroke generalization.

Smart buyers like Apple and others do not chew up and spit out suppliers.

They put out specs, service expectations and they pay!!!

Now, if a supplier thinks because they are established they now can slack off,
they will be creating their own problems.

If they are unhappy with their agreed upon prices, they need to renegotiate or not take the orders.

In any case no manufacturer wants to keep switching sources all the time. If they do, they create internal problems.

As for nobody wanting to work with Apple, you couldn't be more wrong.

Money talks. You put money on the table, contract etc. and suppliers will say forget it? Get real!

 

[deconstruct60]

If there was another $8bn per annum customer Samsung could sell to, they'd be selling to them now.

Not necessarily. You are assuming two things. One, that Samsung has a large amount of underutilized capacity at their fabs. Second, that TSMC has a large amount of underutilized capacity at their fabs.

If very large customer goes from one fab to another then (unless someone is building brand new fab just for them) then folks will play a game of rearranging the deck chairs. The "old" smaller customers will get squeezed out of one and show up at the other company.

You are also a bit confused on what Apple spends the $8bn on. The A5 chip package has a ARM/GPU die, but it also has memory. Is TSMC making RAM too? CPU and memory are not necessarily made at the same fab. Likewise a large chunk of that $8bn is flash. TSMC going to make that too?
Screens?

Besides folks are assuming that TSMC is going to get the yield high enough to satisfy Apple.

There may be some short term bubbles in Samsung's fab but they don't necessarily have to be idle for a protracted period of time. For example, if Samsung started sticking an ARM package in every one of their TV sets they could soak up lots of production. There are tons of devices besides smartphones that are increasingly using ARM cores inside them.

 

[Thunderhawks]

Speculation has grown in Europe as regards to the possibility that the iPhone 6 heat power to be harnessed in powering average consumer homes.

I think you need an adapter for that, especially in the UK.

 

[shompa]

Makes a lot of sense for multiple reasons
1) If there's a problem at one fab, you don't have to grind product shipments to a halt.
2) More capacity for launches
3) Playing them against each other for price.

As for Samsung as a competitor, Apple wouldn't have products if they didn't deal with frenemies. You have basically two suppliers for LCD screens: LG and Samsung. Both competitors in several markets. If you stop doing business with one, prices go up because the other has all the leverage. Stop doing business with both, you can't physically make an iPhone.

The problem is that different manufacturing plants use different manufacturing technology.
Apple can't just take their taped out A5 chip from Samsung and give it to TSMC. Apple need to do a re spin and new tape out.
Since they have to re design the chip, why not make it better?

PowerVR6 was ready for manufacturing. A5+ for IpadHD.

 

[ma2ha3]

The question is if TSMC is big enough and experienced enough to handle the same large quantities that Samsung is and has been handling.QUOTE]

TSMC is the world biggest, largest semiconductor producer of IC, not intel. They are not rank in IC manfacturer because they are a foundry. They made chip for others. They are bigger than Intel, bigger than samsung, and semiconductor ranking, Intel is number 1 and samsung is number 2. shocking but it is the truth.

 

[Mattie Num Nums]

Besides folks are assuming that TSMC is going to get the yield high enough to satisfy Apple.

Or quality. I think Apple may be playing poker with Samsung right now. Apple is either trying to get Samsung to call their bluff or they are going all in with the nuts. I honestly think that anything short of a homerun will be a failure with this move. Apple already is a well oiled machine and like I've seen at a lot of companies, including the one I work for, major shakeups may look good on Powerpoint or in Testing but in production can cause headaches that take years to iron out. The problem is what is Apple plan? Are they going to just move everything and leave Samsung a Dear John letter and let us the consumers deal with the move in possible Quality loss or are they going to slowly ramp down production with the customer and quality in mind. Apples latest moves have shown they are willing to give us not 100% products and let god sort them out. I hope its more like the old days of Apple where everything was 100% or Steve raised hell, not just looking at sales figures.

 

[shompa]

You're kidding, right? TSMC is the largest independent fab in the world. Bigger than GloFo. Bigger than Samsung (not independent).

Read their wikipedia overview.





Diversify risk but also dispense of the meaning "in family." There's no way they'll spread the same chip across two foundries. When people do that, it's product lines they are doing it with (such as AMD spreading a GPU line across GloFo and TSMC).



How convenient, Apple wouldn't need them until next year, in the march/april timeframe.



I don't find that likely. I don't think PowerVR 6 will show up until A7 when we get Cortex A15 cores. Seems to me that A6 will be an A5 die shrink that focuses on higher clocks and lower energy consumption, just like A4 was kind of a die shrink of the 3GS processor (not directly since it added custom logic too).

A6 will be quod core A15 with PowerVR6.
Your timeframe is perfect. 1 quarter next year for a real Ipad3.

But, if and iPadHD is released this year, Apple must produce an A5+ chip since A5 can't drive a retina display.

EricssonST is releasing ARM9 dual core 1.5ghz with PowerVR6 within a couple of month. Technically Apple could do the same.

(I wish that Apple just bought ARM. Would cost 15 billion. Then just stop selling ARM to all competitors. Evil Steve)

 

[shompa]

GlobalFoundries has a ton of new News:

http://www.globalfoundries.com/newsroom/

?
GloFo is almost 2 year late with their 28nm processing.

I emails with an employee at GloFo and he said that they are late because they have relocated 28nm personal to 22nm.

The lack of 28nm at GloFo is why AMD has not one single sub 40nm chip on their roadmap. This is really sad, since we are looking at the death of AMD.

GloFo was AMDs biggest mistake.

 

[shompa]

The question is if TSMC is big enough and experienced enough to handle the same large quantities that Samsung is and has been handling.QUOTE]

TSMC is the world biggest, largest semiconductor producer of IC, not intel. They are not rank in IC manfacturer because they are a foundry. They made chip for others. They are bigger than Intel, bigger than samsung, and semiconductor ranking, Intel is number 1 and samsung is number 2. shocking but it is the truth.

Yes. But you are compering small chips to large chips.
ARM is by far world biggest CPU licenser. Just in one quarter more ARM processors are shipped then X86 in their whole life time. We are talking about 2 billion ARMs per quarter.

By numbers of wafers Intel is bigger then TSMC.

TSMC has had huge problems delivering 40nm parts. AMD had shortages over a year with their graphic parts because TSMC. This can not happened to Apple. No shortages is acceptable for them.
Nvidia/AMD had nowhere else to produce their graphic chips. Apple have at least Samsung.

The best would be if Apple built its own foundry or bought one. In house is always better and cheaper country what "experts" believe.

Just look at A5. Apple design its own ARM chip. It is 30% larger then competitors ARM chips. It cost Apple 25 dollar A5 chip. Tegra2 costs 15 dollar to manufacture. Nvidia needs their money, so a Tegra2 costs 25dollar.

Apple chip is 30% bigger at the same price. This 30% is used to make a better chip. Better memory management and NOVA SIMD extensions. This is why real world benchmarks a single core A4 is within the range of dual core other ARMS.

Tegra3 will get NOVA extensions. The problem is that Google does not control the graphical layer, so they will not be able to accelerate it with SIMD.

 

[shompa]

Or quality. I think Apple may be playing poker with Samsung right now. Apple is either trying to get Samsung to call their bluff or they are going all in with the nuts. I honestly think that anything short of a homerun will be a failure with this move. Apple already is a well oiled machine and like I've seen at a lot of companies, including the one I work for, major shakeups may look good on Powerpoint or in Testing but in production can cause headaches that take years to iron out. The problem is what is Apple plan? Are they going to just move everything and leave Samsung a Dear John letter and let us the consumers deal with the move in possible Quality loss or are they going to slowly ramp down production with the customer and quality in mind. Apples latest moves have shown they are willing to give us not 100% products and let god sort them out. I hope its more like the old days of Apple where everything was 100% or Steve raised hell, not just looking at sales figures.

The problem is the Apple has to move from Samsung with A6.
Samsung has no 28nm line. TSMC has it.

 

[shompa]

Not necessarily. You are assuming two things. One, that Samsung has a large amount of underutilized capacity at their fabs. Second, that TSMC has a large amount of underutilized capacity at their fabs.

If very large customer goes from one fab to another then (unless someone is building brand new fab just for them) then folks will play a game of rearranging the deck chairs. The "old" smaller customers will get squeezed out of one and show up at the other company.

You are also a bit confused on what Apple spends the $8bn on. The A5 chip package has a ARM/GPU die, but it also has memory. Is TSMC making RAM too? CPU and memory are not necessarily made at the same fab. Likewise a large chunk of that $8bn is flash. TSMC going to make that too?
Screens?

Besides folks are assuming that TSMC is going to get the yield high enough to satisfy Apple.

There may be some short term bubbles in Samsung's fab but they don't necessarily have to be idle for a protracted period of time. For example, if Samsung started sticking an ARM package in every one of their TV sets they could soak up lots of production. There are tons of devices besides smartphones that are increasingly using ARM cores inside them.

You are completely right.
Today Samsung is the only supplier of Retina 10inch displays.

Apple has a desire to move all manufacturing from Samsung, but they can only move ARM/Graphics to TSMC.

The sad thing is that Apple helped Samsung to build their foundry service. It was Apples 1 billion a couple of years ago.
Apple should have used that money and build their own foundry.
Now Samsung is Apples biggest competitor in Tablets and smartphones.

Apple orders parts to its tablets/phones.
Six month later Samsung somehow release things that look just like Apples.

 

[Rocketman]

Interestingly if the iPhone 5 A5 heating issue rumors are true, this would open the possibility to an iPhone 5 with A6 as the backup plan which would require a lower power, lower mhz implementation to make work.

This could give iPhone 4 a life cycle a year longer than 3GS which is not even dead yet.

Rocketman

 

[shompa]

what does everyone think the A6 might be. like just at a higher frequency than the A5 (maybe at 1.2 or 1.5 GHz). or does anyone think they might make a quad core (but that would kill battery). i just dont know what more they can add because they A5 is a really powerful chip.

A6 is quod core A15 CPU with 12-16 PowerVR6 graphic cores. CPU power as an intel quod core duo 2-2.5ghz. Fast enough for computers.

A theoretical A5+ is C9 dual core at 1.2-1.5 ghz with powerVR6 graphics.

Why?
Tegra3 later this year is quod core C9 with 12 graphic cores. 40nm (A6 will be around 100% faster if Nvidia don't manage to clock Tegra3 faster then 1.2ghz)

Tegra4 will be A15 quod core 28nm

Late next year Nvidia will have desktop versions of ARM with 8-16 cores. 28nm

And their 64bit ARM. 28nm

Qualcomm has announced quod core A15 CPUs for next year clocked at 2-2.5ghz. 28nm

ST-Ericsson releases C9 dual core 1.5 ghz with PowerVR6 within a couple of month at 40nm

 

[shompa]

Interestingly if the iPhone 5 A5 heating issue rumors are true, this would open the possibility to an iPhone 5 with A6 as the backup plan which would require a lower power, lower mhz implementation to make work.

This could give iPhone 4 a life cycle a year longer than 3GS which is not even dead yet.

Rocketman

The heating rumor is not true. The Chinese rumor is because of cultural differences. They don't understand why iPhone 5 was not released in June because the hardware was available.
The cultural difference is that the hardware is not the phone. It is the software. It is iOS and apps that make the phone great. We knew early may that iPhone 5 would not be released because apple was 3 month late with iOS5.

Apple does not release non tested iOS into their production line. Look at Android 3.0. Full of bugs, crashes and not ready for prime time. Apple usually have a 3 month beta period, so we all along knew that iPhone 5 would be announced in August and released early September.

 

[nunes013]

Apple has so far kept the same basic technology for 2 generations, probably to amortize cost and programming optimization time. Specifically, ARM11/PowerVR MBX Lite was kept for gen 1 and 2 iPhones and ARM Cortex A8/PowerVR SGX535 was kept for gen 3 and 4 iPhones. As such I would expect the Apple A6 to remain Cortex A9/PowerVR SGX543. I think it'll remain dual core CPU just higher clocked, since the use cases of quad core seems to be lower on a mobile device, even a tablet, compared to laptops and desktops. The GPU may be bumped to a SGX543MP4 mainly to meet the demands of a Retina iPad 3. PoweVR multicore GPU architecture is supposed to be very scalable so going from SGX543MP2 to SGX543MP4 will probably be less driver work than switching to the next gen PowerVR 6.

The thing about moving away from Samsung is are they changing their RAM source? While flash memory is sourced from both Samsung and Toshiba, I believe RAM is only sourced from Samsung since they integrated it right on to the SoC package.

i waas thinking about this shortly after. a dual core with a higher clock but bumped graphics to run that display.

depends on apple's licenses with samsung. A4 was an almost mirror image of the Samsung ARM CPU. not sure about A5, but i think it was as well.

with the A6 it will depend on apple licensing samsung's CPU architecture or someone else's

i didnt think of that. lets hope samsung isnt a little mad bc of their fight

A6 is quod core A15 CPU with 12-16 PowerVR6 graphic cores. CPU power as an intel quod core duo 2-2.5ghz. Fast enough for computers.

A theoretical A5+ is C9 dual core at 1.2-1.5 ghz with powerVR6 graphics.

Why?
Tegra3 later this year is quod core C9 with 12 graphic cores. 40nm (A6 will be around 100% faster if Nvidia don't manage to clock Tegra3 faster then 1.2ghz)

Tegra4 will be A15 quod core 28nm

Late next year Nvidia will have desktop versions of ARM with 8-16 cores. 28nm

And their 64bit ARM. 28nm

Qualcomm has announced quod core A15 CPUs for next year clocked at 2-2.5ghz. 28nm

ST-Ericsson releases C9 dual core 1.5 ghz with PowerVR6 within a couple of month at 40nm

8-16 cores on an ARM processor i still cant believe quad core will be out next year as it was amazing last year seeing these things run at 1 Ghz with one core. i know it is a desktop but it still amazes me.

 

[alent1234]

apple never makes a huge move like this, too much risk. just look at the aluminum body thing.

first it came out in the MBA as a niche product that only a few people bought. then the MBP with a bigger market after the manufacturing issues were fixed. and now the ipad