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TSMC Preparing To Manufacturer A6X Chip As Apple Looks to Ditch Samsung
An anonymous reader writes with reports that TSMC is preparing to do a first test run of Apple's A6X chipset currently manufactured by Samsung. The TSMC manufactured chips will feature a process shrink from 32nm to 28nm, and there's a good chance Apple will grant them the contract for the next generation A7 chip. From SlashGear: "The test will kick off in Q1 2013, The China Times reports, with TSMC producing a new, 28nm version of the existing 32nm A6X that Samsung has been producing for the full-sized iPad 4th-gen; the smaller chip, which will likely be more power efficient as well, will debut in a new iPad 5th-gen and iPad mini 2."
Now we can wait for the hardware repetition of the Google Maps fiasco. Whose head is going to roll this time when the shit hits the fan?
I'm so excited to hear about every minor thing Apple does. They sure are a groundbreaking company! Imagine, switching to a different supplier. What insight! What killer business acumen they must have!
I've never in my life heard of such a thing. An electronics company sourcing a different supplier for components!
HOLY SHIT APPLE IS SO FUCKING AMAZING! PLEASE POST MORE INTERESTING STORIES ABOUT APPLE!
I heard a rumor that they are stocking their stationary cabinets with scripto pens, and are no longer using Bics. Is this true!?!?!??!?!?!!
This could sour the cozy relationship between Apple and Samsung.
Have gnu, will travel.
I had been planning to purchase an iPad 4 for a while, but I guess I had better do it soon. I don't really want to be a beta tester for Apple/TSMC. There have been serious problems with TSMC's 28nm process and I don't trust them to get it right. And during the past year or so, Apple has shown a disturbing trend of prioritizing screwing over their competitors (Samsung and Google) above providing a good customer experience, as demonstrated by the Apple Maps fiasco and the myriad of problems with LG displays on the Retina MacBook Pro. I'm very concerned that corners will be cut in the rush to TSMC fabrication.
Getting rid of partners like Samsung will hurt them in the long run. The only reason why Samsung became one of the top suppliers of parts for Apple is due to Apple's long history of problems and failures with smaller partners unable to produce significant quantities with the quality expected by Apple. Of course TSMC is not a small company, but Apple dropping Samsung for parts is about pride not intelligent planning or business strategy. Why drop a relationship that works for something less predictable?
Apple is going to have a very tough year in 2013. They blew their wad last year for product updates and except for minor product revisions will not offer anything interesting until at least the fall if Apple TV is not actually a myth. In the meantime news like this will only scare investors at a time when there had already been a loss in faith with Apple's business strategy.
I think the problem with Apple is they are still trying to follow in Steve Jobs' footsteps. It's only Steve Jobs that had a hate on for Android, Google, and anything connected to them, so pursuing this prideful vendetta against Samsung is like Steve's dying wish. The problem is that Apple is going to have to eventually start making their own decisions and continuing a strategy to remove Google and Samsung as business partners is not in their best interests.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Apple demands "Do it for us cheaper or we go elsewhere!".
Samsung are merely stating that if they aren't going to be generating goodwill from Apple by kowtowing to that demand, why the hell give them preferential prices on their product?
Samsung may not be able to sell quite as many chips as if they had Apple on board, but they'll make more per chip because Apple isn't gouging their profit margins.
The A6X puts everything else in the mobile industry to shame.
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph6472/51764.png
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph6472/51759.png
The first graph is a masure of memory bus bandwidth; while this has historically sucked on ARM in general, and Apple has had the lead in this area because they started life with their own memory controller design replacing the one normally supplied by the ARM folks, this lead has been significantly narrowed in the Samsung Exynos line. There are still some optimizations to be had to match the A6X speed, but it's close enough that for an optimized pipeline, it's not going to matter as much as the graph shows. nVidia's ARM offerings still have pretty sucky memory bandwidth, as do the Qualcomm chips, like the SnapDragon series.
The second graph measures the GL pipeline, and since the Linux stack moves copies of surfaces rather than GL over the user/kernel boundary, there's significant overhead in the protection domain crossing, as well as in amount of data being moved (which devolves, again, to the memory bandwidth issue).
Unless you go direct GL across the user/kernel boundary, and run the surface processing entirely in kernel space, if you are doing software compositing, even in the case of 2D, which applies to the vast majority of surface transforms, since people simply do not watch YouTube videos on rotating cubes or on spheres, you are talking 3 protection domain crossings to get the data from user space to the GPU, process it in the GPU, bring it back to user space, and then push it again across the boundary to get it into the frame buffer.
Basically you are comparing a graphics stack that sucks with one that generally doesn't, except under specifically defined circumstances (and in those cases DirectX beats GL in terms of reduced system vulnerability to unbounded texture processing for both the Linux and MacOS X/iOS stacks).
Either way, the comparisons in those graphs are not straight apples-to-apples unless you happen to be running Android on all your devices, and so have the additional expensive-on-ARM copy and protection domain operations on all the platforms.