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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. :-)
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
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.
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.
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.