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Apple Gets Its First Batch of iPhone Chips From TSMC
redletterdave (2493036) notes that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) has shipped its first batch of microprocessors to Apple as the iPhone maker looks to diversify its overseas suppliers. Apple will continue to rely on Samsung for its microprocessors, but as the rivalry between Apple and Samsung heats up in the mobile and soon wearable arenas, the deal with TSMC allows Apple to be less reliant on Samsung and therefore have more leverage with respect to price negotiations for future chips, as TSMC has supplanted Samsung Electronics as Apple's chief chipmaker for iPhones and iPads. Since 2011, Apple has been striking deals with other display and chip makers around Asia to reduce its dependence on Samsung. As a result of this slowdown in sales, Samsung on Monday announced operating income for its fiscal second quarter had sunk to a two-year low, blaming 'weak' sales of low- and medium-end smartphones, strong competition and subpar demand.
It may not be a household name like Intel or AMD, but TSMC is the world's biggest chip maker by revenue.
It may not be a household name like Intel or AMD, but TSMC is the world's biggest chip maker by revenue.
I suspect that a good part of Samsung's slowing sales is consumers that are tired of spending more money all of the time to do the same thing. I've got a Galaxy SII. It does everything that I need it to do. It's paid for. I don't foresee any needs that a newer phone would fulfill, so short of a broken phone or a paradigm shift I don't see a need to shell out several hundred dollars to have essentially the same functionality.
Geek-chic likes to talk about and to chase the latest gadgets, but the hype really isn't as widespread as reports would indicate, and even those that have chased the newest have often gotten tired of doing it without any real, tangible improvements.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Yes especially in the last couple of years. This negatively impacted NVIDIA and AMD's GPU business more than once. They also had packaging issues a couple of years back. Remember the NVIDIA GPU recall?
TSMC is the world's largest foundry business. They do not design chips. They manufacture chips. Their competitors are companies like GlobalFoundries. AMD does not have factories anymore, everything is manufactured at TSMC or GlobalFoundries, and until a couple of years ago Intel did not allow 3rd parties to use their chip factories.
News at 11
Almost every company half of apple's size has multiple vendors for every part of their product
I would love to see Atmel go with Intel, just to see what could come out of it.
I'd like to see the ATtiny and ATmega series running above 20MHz. Sure there's other Atmel uC that can do that, but in non-DIP packages and at a much higher price.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
TSMC is the largest pure play foundry, not the largest chip manufacturer.
I don't remember TSMC even keeping up with AMD most of the time, and they were a node behind Intel at almost any time.
It appeared to me that TSMC may have seemed to keep up, but AMD and Intel were producing huge dies and had to have a process really fixed before they ramped. TSMC had the luxury of announcing they were at a node, while only producing simple stuff with it and fixing the bugs over a long period of time.
An Aside: In my opinion Intel chip designs have been less than spectacular given the R&D resources they have, it has been the process engineers that have given them the dominance in performance.
I busted my smartphone screen about a year ago (The Motorola Droid Razr XT912). I ordered a new screen, and while I waited for my new screen replacement I reactivated my old Blackberry Bold World Tour (I think it was the 8950? Could be wrong).
I actually enjoyed going back to my blackberry for a few weeks, it has a lot of glitches, and it only has 3g support, so it caused a few headaches. But I use my phone as a phone, so the fact that it could call, text, and do my e-mail was plenty for me. I don't ever use the camera, I don't use any apps except a web browser and Pandora. And honestly, I still love the way blackberry handled email and text. I still miss Viigo, which in my mind, is the single greatest app of all time (Blackberry bought it, and ruined it /sigh).
I have a lot of friends that have the latest and greatest, but honestly they are just fanboys. They show me all these "new" features that are "soooo revolutionary" and I couldn't be more turned off. I will never by a phone with a fingerprint scanner, I see that as a security liability. I won't buy a phone that has a higher pixel density than my eyes can even comprehend (it's just wasted power). I won't buy a phone because it has the latest and greatest OS version (that's why I use Cyanogenmod, no bloatware, and all the new features I could want). I won't buy a phone because it has a faster 4G radio, when cell companies have your bandwidth restricted to the point where you'd blow through all your data in a matter of minutes (and restrict your speed after a certain point, even if it's unlimited). I won't buy a phone that I can never truly own, because of a locked bootloader.
Idk how many people out there are like me. But the phone I would buy, is the phone built for the consumer. Not so locked down that the only way I can upgrade or change the OS is with the original manufacturer's permission. A phone built lean, not so crammed with fancy things I don't need it'll cost a few paychecks to replace/repair if I drop it.
But I really see this going more and more in the direction of desktop computing. Where we've started to see the plateau of not technology itself, but the plateau of the technology the average person needs.
If these companies want to keep increasing their bottom line, there needs to be more innovation, and less of increasing performance numbers. I'm no Apple fanboy, but it seems like these companies are just riding out Apple's innovation and then acting surprised that that innovation has a life expectancy.
Maybe Google project Ara is a step in the right direction? Maybe the Amazon phone? Only time will tell.
We live in a new era where quality is shit and no one cares. Fuck it.
Yes usually Intel has the process lead followed by the group of IBM, GlobalFoundries (which owns the fabs that used to belong to AMD), Samsung. TSMC comes way after that. The main advantage of TSMC has been that it is a lot more responsive to customer requests and they have a lot of capacity. Plus they do not compete with any company in chip design since they are a pure play foundry.
An Aside: In my opinion Intel chip designs have been less than spectacular given the R&D resources they have, it has been the process engineers that have given them the dominance in performance.
This has been the case since, like, forever. At one time AMD actually had process parity with Intel. This was around the time of the 180 nm node. Anyone that remembers Intel processors back then knows they sucked. Horribly.