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TSMC Confirms Deal with Apple to Produce A-Series Chips for Future iOS Devices
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LG has been mostly very good for iPhones and Macs as the main supplier for a long time now. But when they are successful, you don't hear about them. Just like how Scott Forstal was directly responsible for success of iOS (and also worked on OSX before that) but the only thing you read about him these days is a cheap $2 word skeuomorphism.
Funny thing is, I don't see anybody worrying about the chips on the Galaxy S4 or HTC One. Those are TSMC chips.
The lg retina screens have a ton of issues for the retinaMbp. I am just saying sometimes going to another isn't always the best. Plus with how many devices apple needs can they keep up? I feel like this will be better for Samsung as others may come to them for chips rather than risk not getting chips from tsmc.
Apple has a storied history establishing new relationships with chip manufactures, using them, then squeezing them to reduce pricing. After a run of a few years Apple picks a fight bashes them in public so as to make the manufacturer the villain only to be replaced by their next target.
Going way back to the beginning all Macs were equipped with Motorola chips until Apple used them up and spit them out. All the while the Apple devotees used the derogatory term ~ Wintel~ to describe PCs comprised of Windows running on Intel chips.
Once Apple divorced Motorola, only a spin master like Steve Jobs could convince the Apple Faithful that suddenly the chip maker... Intel... they bashed was now going to be used in Macs.
One thing that Apple's great at is remaining a very polarizing company.
There's nothing quite as entertaining as reading the adventures and fables of Apple Inc.
Do you really have a clue??????
Apple shifted from the 68040 to the PPC 601 which was an AIM (Apple, IBM, Motorola).
Talk about over promise and under deliver....
Motorola 68060
Motorola 88K
Anyway, Apple got out of AIM because Motorola was a bad FAB partner and IBM wasn't interested in low power. Take a look at the G5 processor.
Apple went to Intel not because the necessarily wanted to, but because that was the best option available and Intel bends over backwards to satisfy Apple.
I don't know about good numbers but this is plenty of incentive to wait until 2014 for an iPad update. We will get one of these three things:
- Longer battery life
- Far greater performance
- Possibly one and two combined
It looks like I didn't make my point clear. Apple didn't "go another" with retina MBP. LG has always been one of main suppliers for displays. People have this weird idea that Apple picked LG to spite Samsung Display which technically isn't even the same company as Samsung Electronics who make the phones and chips. LG has always been supplying displays for iMac and laptops for Apple, and iPhones and iPad, much longer and in a larger capacity than Samsung.
Samsung might benefit from this deal but can other clients provide as much demand and price point as Apple did?
no the iPhone 5 was the worst kept secret ever... or maybe it was the 4, that was left in a bar for goodness sake.
Thanks for correcting the "bunk".
IBM Power Series lives on, but I'm not even sure if Moto or IBM even make any embedded Power PC's anymore. Sad really, but Apple couldn't get market share high enough to drive more development in low power versions of Power PC's for the laptop market.
All said and done, savvy on Jobs part to have an Intel fork of OSX under development and polished. Really opened up the market with folks that were on both platforms, Windows and OSX. Can't wait for the "new" Mac Pro to run SolidWorks, et al.
The architecture is still superior. PPCs problem was the there simply wasn't a customer base to justify sinking millions into process development for IBM or Motorola at the time. Motorola spun off their semiconductor business which resulted in even fewer options for process development. The unfortunate thing here is that Apple wasn't in a position to finance the development of new processes and improved PPC designs.
Actually the G5 was a terrible processor for running a general purpose OS. Its integer performance at the time was just terrible. This is why Steveo always focused on Alt-Vec and general floating point performance which is nice but that sort of performance is only useful part of the time.
Yep, at the time Intel and frankly AMD, had billions to waste on hacking i86 until it worked well. Even before G5 hit integer performance on i86 was rapidly improving. The problem today is that all of that cruft they still support on i86 means that Intel has to be at least two process generations ahead to break even on power usage relative to other architectures.
Longer battery life, greater performance, thinner, narrower, lighter weight are a given.
What's not to like?
This. I've been reading Macrumors almost daily since 2001 but didn't bother signing up until a few years ago. And I rarely ever post yet know A LOT about Apple.
BTW that logo always makes me think of a dirty sliding screen door to someone's backyard. Just as bad a Space Ibiza's (nightclub) logo.
Actually TSMC did far better with a difficult node transition than many foundries. Just look at Global Foundries for just one example. The reality is that it took awhile but TSMC got its crap together before most of the foundries world wide. At this point rumors are that the lead at the 20 nm nodes.
All the rumors about Apples anger with Samsung don't really hold up as it looks like TSMC is pulling ahead to a world wide leadership position. Apples move is likely motivated as much by the desire to be on the best process in the future.
Basically money is going to Samsung for all these Apple products. Why continue to fund a competitor?
Nah just truth ... B4 I don't have option but HTC one changed it .. now I don't even rMBP for regular use .. but 4 sure I will get new Mac pro for office
The logo represents _exactly_ what TSMC is doing. Apart from that, they don't have any customers who care the slightest bit what TSMC's logo looks like.
The average customer of TSMC is someone highly experienced in the design of processors or other chips, and can see on first sight that the logo shows a wafer with a few hundred chips, with a remarkably large percentage of good chips. You are not their customer.
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Especially when Apple can buy brand X components cheaper while still charging the same price to customers. It's a huge highly profitable move for Apple. And who doesn't enjoy seeing a fat cat like Apple get richer
The article is foolish, it is obsessed with the far future (always a better place for a pundit wannabe to discuss) and ignores the near future.
Apple, even today, uses a widish range of custom CPUs. We have the A6 for the iPhone and A6X for the iPad. We also have the A5X for the iPad2 (which went through a die shrink a while ago) and a single-core A5 for AppleTV (which used to be built from dual-core A5's rejected for phones, but was customized down to a single core so as to waste less silicon). Also whatever the iPad mini uses.
Point is why would we expect this to change in the future?
And if Apple is producing a range of chips, from cutting edge (the next A7X, for example) all the way down to the Apple TV A5, why does it have to switch ALL of them at the exact same time to TSMC?
It is highly likely (IMHO) that a variety of different types of contracts have been signed with TSMC.
One may be "let's try TODAY our simplest chip, the single core A5, on your line, and see how well it works. and what the issues are".
A very different contract may be "once we've learned (from our single-core A5 experiment) the most important differences between your line and our earlier line, let's plan to try running the A7X on your line and see what happens".
Yet a third contract might be "Assuming Apple can get the A7X to work on your line AND assuming that you hit the following milestones over the next five years, then APPLE will commit to ordering x million chips at a price of $xxx, with these penalty clauses for late deliver, etc etc".
The point is, in this sort of partnership there is scope for many different contracts, from an informal "you'll try to run our design, and our engineers will discuss the results with your engineers as we debug the problems" to an extremely formal "this is how much money will change hands, for these results, with the following three hundred pages of who does what under various problems and contingencies".
Anyone trying to read the tea leaves by assuming that there is ONE TSMC Apple contract, and that if such and such was not mentioned, then any story about such a contract must be nonsense, is a fool.
Really...
With the icons Ive presented and the Little Pony Pastel color pallet of iOS 7 that's your first comment to the post.
Maybe TSMC can help Apple redesign iOS 7 so it looks like something someone would want to use besides a 14 year old year girl.
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