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

Too little, too late

[akahige]

More to the point, how can you find out which chip the phone has before buying it?

Re:Too little, too late

[soft_guy]

The fact that they ship an improved version every year or so is NOT the issue here. Seriously if the new version is not a big enough improvement over the one you have, you don't need to buy it. You can keep your phone for 2 years, or 3 years, or however long you want. That is hardly "pushing it through the throats of customers". You have to have a major victim mentality to think that. I do agree though that shipping non-equivalent versions of the processor is a big deal. That's not okay.

Re:Too little, too late

[gstoddart]

I'm sorry, but who is pushing a new iPhone "through the throats of customers"??

You are completely free to not fucking buy one.

Did you know that car makers push out a new version, only slightly different, annually? Companies who make golf clubs, also push out new versions at least annually. And companies who make TVs, they also do this.

If customers buy a new expensive phone every year or two, don't blame the vendor. Free will doesn't stop just because you've bought a product.

Re:Too little, too late

[tripleevenfall]

A vendor making a mid-model year substitution for a better product seems like a benefit to me, not a detriment. Instead of nobody getting the improved version, at least some people do.

Re:Too little, too late

[UnknowingFool]

If sourcing substantially different parts from different vendors is necessary to meet production volume, then they need to have different part names and model names for these products.

Let's start with the first thing: These parts are not supposed to be substantially different. They are the same design but at a smaller feature size. The fact that they are is a problem and Apple will have to get with Samsung and TSMC to figure what is the issue. Second, different sources parts are known internally but not externally. After all, does Intel rename a Broadwell Core i7 differently when it comes from Oregon or Arizona or Ireland? No. There is a part number that tells where the chip was made and you as a customer don't know where it came from when you order it from Newegg or Micron or wherever.

This isn't a case of having resistors or capacitors from different manufacturers, something that won't affect performance in any measurable way, this is a case of having two completely different CPUs, with very different performance from the two.

How is an dual core A9 from Apple a "completely different CPU" than an dual core A9 from Apple. They are the exact same design by Apple. If you feel that makes them "completely different", did you lecture Microsoft when they switched Xbox processors? From what I remember IBM Xenon processor was shrink reduced from 90nm to 65nm to 45nm. These are all "different" CPUs to you?

6h vs. 8h in a power-consumption test is a huge, huge difference.

And if it's true, Apple will have to look into why.

Intel sells CPUs all the time which are very similar, but have performance that differs to that extent: they use completely different part numbers to describe these parts.

The problem with this comparison is that a Core i7 is not the same as a Core i5 with actual differences like L3 cache size, TDP, clock speed, etc. and these come from different designs.

Re:Too little, too late

[Anubis IV]

MacRumors didn't do any testing at all. They're just compiling lists of tests that others are doing, in an effort to get a sense for whether or not there actually are large differences. And the A9 chips being provided by Samsung and TSMC are SoCs, not just CPUs, so it makes perfect sense that they'd be running benchmarks that include video processing and other non-CPU-bound tasks, given that the A9 is responsible for those as well.

Moreover, given the variance in performance that can occur within chips from even a single manufacturer, it's no surprise that there will be variation between the two models. If there weren't, it would be a news story. As such, the important questions to ask are:
1) Is the difference between the two broadly reproducible (i.e. is Samsung consistently behind), or is it this just an anecdotal case involving a single low-performing Samsung chip being compared to a single high-performing TSMC chip?

2) Given the variation, do either of them fall below the specs provided by Apple?

We don't have enough data yet to answer #1, but, again, as more data is coming to light, it's sounding like things are not so lopsided as the initial reports indicated. TSMC may have a slight edge, but it's not anywhere in the ballpark of what was being reported earlier. As for #2, by all indications, the answer is "no, neither of them fall below Apple specs". Which is to say, some people may win out on the luck of the draw and get a phone with a chip that performs better...which was already the case anyway, since chips are never perfectly identical in their performance. All a manufacturer will do is guarantee that the performance falls within a certain range, so some will always perform better than others, even when built using the same process from the same manufacturer.

Re:Too little, too late

[Aaden42]

Apple doesn’t “send down” any updates. You’re free to take or leave any OS update you like. They’re remind you a bit, but nobody is forced to upgrade the OS they have on their phone right now.

And do you *seriously* think Apple releases updates to “actively try to fuck up older but functioning hardware”? Paranoid much? Yes, some updates have made older hardware work less well. Other updates have improved long standing issues on older hardware. That’s the nature of software development. It’s not a good thing, but it’s a far distance between “didn’t test it as much on three-year-old hardware” and “let’s intentionally add this bug to make the old phone flake out.”

Re:16 nm vs 14 nm

[TheRaven64]

I'm not particularly familiar with either company's process, but it's been a couple of generations since you could actually make meaningful comparisons based on the quoted nm size, because everyone has different smallest features that they measure when deciding that they are Xnm. That said, we passed the end of Dennard scaling a long time ago. You'd expect the same chip to be consuming about as much power, be slightly more able to dissipate the heat. It may also have less leakage, though that depends on a number of other factors.

Samples sizes of 1

[radarskiy]

"tests of a pair of 6s Plus phones"

You can't argue with the statistical validity of that analysis... because there isn't any.