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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."
And as soon as the first chip comes off the assembly line, Apple will sue Samsung for patent infringement. :-)
I think that's nominally true for CPUs designed from the ground up. Given that chip's taking most of it's cues from reference designs by ARM themselves... I think this is less of the usual case.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
No, but they might have spent $3.9B so they can say its CPU is not "Made in China" and have a Chinese company "procure" the designs and start making the next gen chips based on the tech, while also having to worry about grey market versions of Samsung and Apple devices that utilize the processor.
If they can control a key component of the device (and "made in america" certainly provides that), then they can minimize grey market goods impact on their branded devices by potentially relegating them to an inferior parts chain.
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Aren't the knockoffs all A9 shite cpu's? I haven't seen a KIRF with an A15, much less 64-bit chip yet.
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
The byzantine balance of relationships between Samsung and Apple seem beyond even Milo Minderbinder's capacity for finding vested interests between mortal enemies.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Seriously, 1 GB of RAM? Still?
I agree, with QEMM, 640K ought to be enough for anybody. Who needs 1GB.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Samsung is a Korean company and manufacturers ICs in Korea.
Huh interesting points... I would have guessed that this might be a ploy for Apple to grab some of the military-industrial complex work. I've never seen apple junk in the defense sector before, but if they can get security officers to begin insisting on using US-sourced electronics, then Apple has a honey pot of high margin contracts to reap.
Until Apple's or Samsung's compromised corporate network becomes a medium through which Chinese competitors can gain access to the designs, certainly.
Sure, an IP-disrespecting competitor will then have to learn through trial and error how to actually manufacture the new tech in the chip, but reverse-engineering an existing thing is often easier than coming up with it in the first place.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
What I see in this is Apple is NOT letting up their push for better CPU/Graphics.
The long term plan is obviously to be able to DOMINATE through superiority.
These chips are actually made in malta. They just move them here to get a better price.
Designed in Germany by Indians for production in China by Koreans to be unpacked by Texans and purchased by Mexicans.
Still relevant, still funny...
>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)
Wooo! Cutting edge! Or maybe that's the same finfet technology Intel has been casually making in high yield production since Ivy Bridge.
Actually, Samsung owns a fab in Texas that makes Apple SoCs - and that's all it does.
And that's been the case for a few years now, even through the Samsung-Apple patent spat.
It's a complex relationship, to the say the least -
...by a bunch of cheap H1B's
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Is there a 'let me wikipedia that for you' link?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I think the relevant points got left out... the summary missed the most interesting parts:
1G L2 - all of graphics memory now fits in the L2 cache
14nm design - someone needs to update Wikipedia; they can probably clock it faster than the op speed listed there
Quad core - this thing may be in the next MacBook Air
Memory bus - Apple's memory bus is still faster than everyone else's by a mile; pays to have the Alpha->NetScaler->PA Semi guys on the payroll
This things is probably going to beat the pants off every other ARM chip in a while. Oh yeah, forgot: they're already sampling.
There's a great website called LMGTFY... :)
But, as a FYI, Apple was one of the founders of ARM, so it stands to reason Apple would have access to any kind of licensing they wanted.
http://www.linleygroup.com/new... is from 2012, and is pretty accurate.
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.
It's true!! It's all true!
says the user of a phone OS that requires more than 1GB of RAM.
If I wanted just a phone, I'd buy a flip phone and pay a lower monthly bill. People buy iPhone or Android devices instead of flip phones because they want a multi-purpose* mobile computing device.
Or maybe that's the same finfet technology Intel has been casually making in high yield production since Ivy Bridge.
In the real world, theoretical performance matters less than observed performance on the specific applications that end users want to run on a device. How well do Intel's FinFET CPUs run the existing library of games and other proprietary ARM-native apps for phones and tablets that aren't yet available as fat binaries? Is its ARM-to-x86 JIT up to even half the performance of native code yet?
Samsung's different divisions have little to do with each other. When I worked in the Flash memory business some years ago, various Samsung business units - their optical drives, their phones, were among our customers. During price negotiations, when I'd ask our rep why they don't go in-house to Samsung's flash if they want such a low price, usually the answer was that they didn't like them, and preferred us. So don't imagine that if a Samsung BU builds something that another BU can use, that they necessarily use that.
The vast majority of what's different between iOS and OSX is the UI
That and end users' inability to configure iOS's Gatekeeper.
and the OSX UI wouldn't be appropriate in any way for a phone.
How would the OS X UI be inappropriate for a phone docked to a Bluetooth keyboard and AirPlay monitor? The docked phone's touch screen would behave like a trackpad. Or how would it be inappropriate for an iPad with a clip-on keyboard and trackpad?
there are 5 ARM architecture licenses in the world which let you build the ARM instructions into your own custom design
everyone else has the vanilla license where you can use the reference design with minor changes allowed
That's probably not what he means. It's been hypothesized and rumored that Apple will eventually move all their laptops and desktops away from Intel and use ARM as the CPU. Intel has been behind schedule delivering next-generation chips, which leads to the conclusion that Apple would want to control its own destiny with its own CPUs.
Why's that, eh? ICs made from wood not good enough for you, eh?
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
They have been going to get divorced and accusing each other of all kind of horrible things for the last decade, yet they are constantly on some romantic trip together. Can't these two decide if they love or hate each other already?
Because counterfeiting something as complicated as a chip like the A9 will not be easy. Yes a Chinese company can get a sample of one and analyze all the structures. Making a chip will be harder as chip foundries are not easy to build. It would have been far easier if Apple contracted out a Chinese company to make their chips and then that company sold "defective" ones to counterfeiters.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Yep, I work for a company that actually makes flash memory and a lot of it is sold to Samsung. This gives Samsung a second source if they need increased volume without investing in another flash fab, and some of our product types (yes, there are many types of flash memory and implementations of it) are not made by Samsung so it's cheaper for them to buy it from us.
Is 'Made in America' going to be a premium?
It might sell in the USofA but the rest of the world should become very suspicious when something this complex has been made in the land of the three letter agencies and National Security Letters...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
There's probably a better pun there somewhere but it's been a long day.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
So, the cheapest TV stick imaginable has a Cortex A9 processor, so reading about the A9 processor in development by Apple is something that doesn't inspire much in the way of excitement up front for me. But it looks like Apple's A5 is more / less the Cortex A9 with some tweaks, so now we literally have two similar products with the same name that are generations apart.
I know of their technical strength in the low-power scene, and the MIPS/Watt race, ARM still leads by a mile, but ARM could also really stand to have some standards for naming the variants in a semi-consistent way so that the merely technically proficient have a chance of keeping up. And, (dare I say it?) this is what trademarks are for and why they exist.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Its a smart business method. My conglomerate group used to do the internal thing, but the past decade has consisted of making sure each business unit functions acceptably in the market on its own. The sister companies compete with outside clients for jobs, etc. It ensures that you don't end up with a bloated business unit riding on the laurels of another. When that happens, you get a single point of failure for all business units.
That way they will always have a ready market of users waiting to upgrade. They did the same thing with the big phones. The demand was there for years but they carried on selling small form phones till the market for small form phones is going to fall. Then when they release the big phones, boom!! the pent-up demand guarantee increased sale.
Not hardly.
"Big phones" was a private "thing" with the then-CEO. I think his last name was "Jobs".
Considering the timing of SJ's demise, relative to the introduction of the iPhone 5, then 6 and 6 Plus, I would venture to say that Apple approved the iPhone 5 (the first "big" iPhone) as a sort of "marketing test" on the very day that Steve J. stopped breathing.
Remember, it takes TIME to approve new case designs, displays, etc; not to mention new SoCs to drive the extra pixels. It isn't like you just put the old phones in the Incredible Blow-Up Machine and voila!
Then, when the market acceptance of the iPhone 5 was encouraging, they started market research and engineering R&D on the (bigger still) iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
But if you want to talk about Planned Obsolescence by continually releasing "The Next Big Thing" that is simply the "The Previous Big Thing" with a slightly different/better "Gotta Have It" geegaw or case design, look no further than Samsung; with their FIFTY NINE new models of Smartphones released in 2014 alone.
So stop your ridiculous Apple Hating. They are actually a pretty "restrained" tech-driven Company.
They went 680x0 -> PowerPC 6xx -> x86.
You forgot the ARM port of significant portions of OS X (specifically the XNU/Darwin portions?).
So that makes THREE, no FOUR "Ports".
Actually, it is three; but still pretty cool.
I remember SJ standing up at a WWDC keynote right after the (essentially flawless) Intel transition of OS X,saying "Our engineers have worked long an hard to turn THIS (shows an OS X Desktop (ostensibly running on PPC)) to THIS (Ripple-Transition to an identical OS X Desktop (ostensibly running on Intel)). Crowd goes wild. Very effective demonstration. and it was true: The transition from PPC to Intel was virtually seamless, as was the transition from 32 to 64 bit. None of that horseshit like with Windows, with its TWO "Program Files" directory-trees, and its 32/64 bit drivers (there was a LITTLE bit of that with a FEW drivers; but not NEARLY to the extent that Windows users had (and still have) to suffer).
I personally would have like to have seen them carry Rosetta along a little longer; but they saw how long it took to rid everything of 68k code when they did the 68k -> PPC transition, and was anxious to keep OS X as architecturally "Clean" as possible; so it makes sense.
That's only two switches. Count the arrows!
Well, it depends.
You could almost legitimately count the 16 -> 32 bit transition of the 68k MacOS as nearly equivalent to a "Platform Change". They essentially had to do a complete rewrite on the Macintosh Toolbox, on QuickDraw, on QuickTime, and the OS itself, not to mention all the developers that had to re-do their applications to be "32 bit Clean" (remember that?).
Shoot, MS is STILL trying to sort out 32 vs 64 bit for Windows; and their "solution" is about as fugly as fugly gets!
They can just get the arm license for the stock chip anyway, what's the point in reverse engineering one?
I think that's nominally true for CPUs designed from the ground up. Given that chip's taking most of it's cues from reference designs by ARM themselves... I think this is less of the usual case.
Well, if "that chip's taking most of it's cues from reference designs by ARM" - why the hell is it so different from all other ARM chips? Why is it still the only 64bit ARM chip shipping?
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.