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Apple and Samsung Already Working On A9 Processor
itwbennett writes According to a report in Korean IT Times, Samsung Electronics has begun production of the A9 processor, the next generation ARM-based CPU for iPhone and iPad. Korea IT Times says Samsung has production lines capable of FinFET process production (a cutting-edge design for semiconductors that many other manufacturers, including AMD, IBM and TSMC, are adopting) in Austin, Texas and Giheung, Korea, but production is only taking place in Austin. Samsung invested $3.9 billion in that plant specifically to make chips for Apple. So now Apple can say its CPU is "Made in America."
apple and qualcomm are custom designs that run the ARM instruction set. only three other companies in the world have that license. everyone else gets to make the ARM reference design
List of third-party implementations of ARM architecture shows Qualcomm Snapdragon (ARMv7), Apple A series (ARMv8), Applied Micro X-Gene (ARMv8), NVIDIA Denver (ARMv8), and Cavium ThunderX (ARMv8). Everything else is ARM's own Cortex reference design.
People that bash Apple always get really quiet when it comes to mobile chip tech. Apple mobile devices are saddled with chips that are several generations ahead of their nearest competitors.
The launch of the 5s Apple absolutely blindsided the entire industry with the A7. A 64bit arm chip shipping in a flagship product that sold almost 3 million units in the first 24 hours. Nobody was else even /sampling/ 64 bit arm processors. Most did not even have 64 bit on their roadmap save a few server targeted chips.
Very forward looking behavior from apple. You're going to need 64 bit to use more than 2GB of ram without major pain (32 bit addressing is a bitch and workarounds are slow) By the time the rest of the industry is going to be faced with the inevitable transition apple will already have years of experience with 64bit in their mobile platform.