Not All iPhone 6s Processors Are Created Equal (itworld.com)

itwbennett writes: Apple is splitting the manufacture of the A9 processor for its iPhone 6s between TSMC (~60%) and rival Samsung (~40%) — "and they are not created equal," writes Andy Patrizio. For starters, Chipworks noted that Samsung uses 14nm while TSMC uses 16nm. A Reddit user posted tests of a pair of 6s Plus phones and found the TSMC chip had eight hours of battery life vs. six hours for the Samsung. Meanwhile, benchmark tests from the folks at MyDriver (if Mr. Patrizio's efforts with Google Translate got it right) also found that the Samsung chip is a bigger drain on the phone's battery, while the TSMC chip is slightly faster and runs a bit cooler. So how do you know which chip you got? There's an app for that.

Comments

Only seen in specific benchmarks

[hattig]

http://www.macrumors.com/2015/...

As suspected from early results yesterday, the takeaway from Morrison and Evans' videos today seems to be that while intense cases like synthetic Geekbench tests designed to push devices to their limits can reveal significant differences in battery life between devices using the two chips, real-world impacts are much smaller and are likely to be unnoticeable to many users.

That explains a few things...

[__aaclcg7560]

My friend and I both got iPhone 6s. His run hot, mine run cool. Go figure.

Re:Battery Life

[Anonymous Coward]

Power lines cause very little interference to cell phones. It is very likely your office has eco-friendly windows. They have a very thin metal coating which greatly attenuates the signal. It is the same at my company. A part of our bulding recently had new windows (and some other eco-tweaks) installed and the signal there is almost gone, returning to almost full strength when the window is opened.

Re:Battery Life

[ledow]

I charged my Samsung (non-i) phone once this week.

And that was only because it dipped below 30%.

Admittedly it's not calling 24 hours a day, but it's on 4G all the time and has modern smartphone capabilities.

16 hours battery life? That's pathetic. Really?

The one thing I have to hand to iPads is that they last a long time on battery. But 16 hours? That's just the perfectly ANNOYING level of battery life. Not enough to survive a day.

Re:Too little, too late

[UnknowingFool]

Simple: don't buy it at all. If a company is going to play shenanigans like this where products marketed with the exact same name and part number are significantly different and it's just a luck-of-the-draw ass to whether I get the good one or the crappy one, I'm just not going to buy their product at all.

Play shenanigans? That pre-supposes that somewhere at Apple, Tim Cook and company are laughing at their customers because they fell for their secret, master plan of causing Apple bad PR and headaches. Maybe in the real world, Apple, like many companies, have to source parts from multiple suppliers for practical reasons like: redundancy and demand. Certainly Apple isn't the first and the last company to run into problems when their part which should be identical has differences because of which plant made them.

Re:Too little, too late

[Anubis IV]

As more data is coming to light, it's sounding like the differences are smaller than first estimated and were likely exaggerated as a result of synthetic benchmarks not accurately modeling real-world performance. Specifically, while it does sound like TSMC's chips are performing far better than Samsung's in the synthetic benchmarks (e.g. Geekbench's battery tests), MacRumors has some followup on the topic, indicating that in the real world tests that are ongoing, the results so far appear to be much closer between the two models.

It sounds like the synthetic benchmarks may be slamming a part of the processor that TSMC has optimized better than Samsung, but that in real-world performance, that part is used far less frequently than in the synthetic benchmark, meaning that the results from the synthetic benchmark may not accurately model real-world performance.

Re:Too little, too late

[UnknowingFool]

Did Apple Spec out the correct specs to Samsung and they made a cheap knockoff, after sending a batch that seems to meet initial QA, in a very German style. Or did Apple know about/agree to giving different quality products.

There are both done on slightly different processes and it seems there is a difference that should not be there. It may be that somewhere in the Samsung process (masking, lithography, etc), a difference is significant enough to cause this battery issue. Or that something about Apple's design (or chip design in general) is affected by the step down to 14nm that isn't noticeable in 16nm. Remember that chip features are starting approaching the limits where problems occur that require design changes like multi-gate which did not occur at larger feature sizes.

Re:Too little, too late

[sg_oneill]

Apple has been generally pretty good with that. Older iPhones will still run newer software, although in some cases its debatable if its actually a good idea to do so, if the software is written under the assumption of a more performant processor. At least with the laptops, my Macbook 2011 is running the latest and greatest OSX at a cracking pace, and my GFs iphone 5 is fully updated and running well.

Re:Too little, too late

[AmiMoJo]

They have a history of doing this too, because like like to have two suppliers competing. Most of the time no-one cares, but for example a few years back they had all those dodgy "retina" LCDs on their laptops. There were two suppliers, LG and Sharp, and all the LG ones were prone to ghosting while the Sharp ones were fine.

The only thing customers could do is keep taking the laptops back when ghosting appeared and hoping that the replacement had a Sharp LCD. I think that's what upset people, the way it was handled. On the other hand I can appreciate that Apple probably didn't want to replace millions of LCD panels if they could avoid it.

This is pretty shitty though, because the lesser of the two CPUs isn't defective and thus the customer can't swap the phone for a better one. They just have to live with reduced battery life and performance on their very expensive new shiny. It will be interesting to see what Apple do. For example, if they ban apps that detect which CPU you have then people will endlessly speculate about why their battery life is crap and keep worrying about it, but if they don't people will demand exchanges. Could affect resale price too.

Re:Too little, too late

[AmiMoJo]

Yep, it's most likely a problem with the design. Shrinking from 16nm to 14nm isn't simply a case of scaling your design files by 87.5%, you have to make separate ones. You can carry over most of the high level design and layout, but the computer has to re-synthesise the detailed transistor structure, you might have to use different cache memory, different power and voltage management devices etc. 14nm is a different process, it's not just a slightly better focus on a lens or something.

So the two were never going to be exactly the same, and chances are it's just that the 16nm design is a bit better optimized. Could be that it makes better use of the materials used, could be that the computer did a better job on synthesis, could be a number of things. I really doubt that Samsung sabotaged it though.