We are never getting back to... Samsung's baking Apple's 14nm 'A9' chips? A new generation of smaller, faster Apple processors is now under production by Samsung, including at Sammy's Texan facility, according to reports. While Apple and Samsung have a rather fraught relationship (mainly conducted through lawyers) Samsung’s components division is a major supplier to Cupertino. It’s not known what …
Apple negotiates very hard on price. So hard that careless manufacturers make a loss - on a huge scale - and go bankrupt. Sometimes Apple picks up the pieces for a pittance. Samsung have more brains than that and would happily tell Apple to get their displays elsewhere if Samsung does not like the price.
I am sure the price of these CPU's includes the cost of being sued again - after all, Apple needs to keep finding ways of diverting money from share dividends to their lawyers.
Apple negotiates very hard on price. So hard that careless manufacturers make a loss - on a huge scale.
That's exactly what Apple does. And what Apple just discovered, just like Amazon and General Motors, is that building chips is massively more difficult than writing software.
Samsung knows the value of their chip design and manufacturing and they charge market value for it. It takes skill, experience, and experience (yes, I wrote it twice) to design and manufacture something as advanced as an A9. Apple demanding wafer-thin margins isn't going to budge Samsung.
I've seen this before. Apple demands on paying an absurdly low price for the A9's, "or else". Samsung calls Apple's bluff and refuses. Apple then thinks they can make the chips themselves, and in the process they discover that talented 14nm design engineers are very rare, as they piss away half a a billion dollars designing an A9 that doesn't work.
After a feeble attempt to find another supplier, a humiliated Apple goes crawling back to Samsung, who can now charge more money for the A9's.
They can't, because Apple could go with TSMC like they did for the A8, or go with Global Foundries.
Samsung was left with a LOT of very underutilized fab space when Apple chose TSMC to make the A8 and A8X. Fabs cost billions to build and have a limited lifetime, if you have empty fab space you lose billions of dollars. They've every incentive to offer Apple a good price to get them to come back, and are certainly not in a position to fleece them.
Besides, as is always pointed out, Samsung is composed of several independent operating units, and the part that makes chips is different from the one that makes phones that is involved in lawsuits with Apple.
Re: Fab capacity. My understanding is that both TSMC and Samsung have been running at close to 100% available capacity for there latest generation fabs (i.e 28nm and smaller) - any underutilisation is likely to be in older processes if at all.
For new processes, Intel and Samsung tend to deliver on time and at volume - TSMC/GF have had problems delivering both on-time and at expected capacities. It never really hurts TSMC other than in reduced revenue as they still have very full order books.
It is pretty obvious given the massive amount of capacity Apple was using. With an average die size of 100 mm^2, given the volumes of chips they'd be buying it is essentially the entire output of one modern fab. I saw figures suggesting that Samsung would drop to 30% utilization on their leading edge processes as a result of Apple ditching them for TSMC.
In 2012 the McClean report estimated that Apple was responsible for 89% of Samsung's foundry business. They essentially have no foundry business without Apple. They are not like TSMC, who has hundreds of customers from big ones like Qualcomm and Nvidia to countless small ones who use 10 year old processes to make microcontrollers for microwaves and toasters. They use some for themselves, but don't/can't use their Exynos SoCs in much of the world and their smartphone sales are falling so they can't pick up the slack internally.
http://www.icinsights.com/news/bulletins/Samsung-Jumps-To-3-In-2012-Foundry-Ranking-Has-Sights-Set-On-2-Spot-In-2013-/ (see paragraph above figure 1)
"It is pretty obvious given the massive amount of capacity Apple was using. With an average die size of 100 mm^2, given the volumes of chips they'd be buying it is essentially the entire output of one modern fab. I saw figures suggesting that Samsung would drop to 30% utilization on their leading edge processes as a result of Apple ditching them for TSMC."
You are making the (incorrect) assumption that Apple are the only people who want to make use of Samsung's fabs.
I'm making that correct assumption on the basis that Apple was reported in 2012 to account for 89% of Samsung's foundry business. Who are Samsung's other major foundry customers? There are none. They are only a major foundry player because of Apple. Without Apple, they'd drop from the #3 spot out of the top 10 if they lost that volume of business.
I wrote:
"You are making the (incorrect) assumption that Apple are the only people who want to make use of Samsung's fabs."
You replied:
"I'm making that correct assumption on the basis that Apple was reported in 2012 to account for 89% of Samsung's foundry business"
I think you missed the point... I'm saying the demand is there for that process regardless of whether Apple are using it or not..
FWIW iSuppli has Samsung ranked #2 by revenue from 2002-2013 (IDM & foundry), I guess we'll have to wait for the 2014 figures to see if A8X put a measurable dent in those figures.
You should keep in mind that Apple are still shipping a lot of Samsung chips in their gear that aren't A8X's - simply because they can't get enough volume from anyone else - which is not surprising given that Samsung has been #2 (second only to Intel) by revenue for over a decade.
Samsung would have more cause to worry if Intel+Micron managed to muscle in on the Apple business.
Keep in mind the entire industry is made up of "Frenemies" who are trying to slaughter each other in one arena, and are highly dependent business partners in another.
I highly doubt Samsung's Chip division will price it any higher (or lower) than normal for chips manufactured with a reasonably rare advanced fab process based on whatever volumes are negotiated in the contracts. Gotta recover costs for the fab, and there just aren't very many 14nm fabs on the planet.
One minute we're being told that Samsung copy Apple's designs and both the devices and the appearance of the OS are carbon copies of iPhones and IOS. The next minute we're being told that Samsung phones 'look like cheap shit'.
Logically, there's only one way that both of these statements are true.
They stopped copying the iPhones when they got sued. They had a model that looked very very much like the iPhone 3GS ages ago, then changed to a design that looked much different (you know a design for a rectangular shape with rounded corners for which Samsung has a design patent, which looks quite different from the rectangular shape with rounded corners for which Apple has a design patent).
But then you know that anyway and only try to get voted up by the Android fans, right?
" Apple had the design patent on a rectangle with rounded corners and Samsung had a patent on a circle with flat sides"
Neither of these are proper uses of the word patent. They are registered designs, which can be protected in a similar way to a patent. But a patent has to have some sort of intellectual content.
Only Americans could confuse the two issues.
@Fluffy Bunny - "Neither of these are proper uses of the word patent. They are registered designs, which can be protected in a similar way to a patent. But a patent has to have some sort of intellectual content.
Only Americans could confuse the two issues"
Only someone who is being annoyingly ignorant (while disparaging others) could not realise that in the USA a 'Registered Design' is called a 'Design Patent'. It's not as if this is the first time it has been pointed out here.
They don't know for certain, it is all rumor. There were rumors about Apple switching away from Samsung for a couple years before they finally did for the A8 used in the iPhone 6/6+. So this may or may not be true.
However, Apple probably doesn't care overly much if people find out Samsung is fabbing their chips again this year. Samsung wouldn't know what its capabilities are anyway, at least not beyond what is required for them to do testing before the chips are packaged.
Bold call. Or trolling. But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.
As you point out, Apple bought PA Semi which had some of the ol' Digital team. Didn't start business until 2003, didn't start shipping until 2006/7 ish. And they only made that paragon of virtue, the Power line.
Apple bought PA not for their products, but to bend the engineers to designing Apple products. That and the rights is has to the Power architecture. Other than that, PA Semi as a company was mediocre at best.
Samsung has been shipping ARM chips since 2000, and presumably designing them before then. Add to that the fact that PA Semi didn't actually make any chips ever (that work was outsourced) I'd say Sammers has much better experience in designing and shipping chips.
Not that I'm any great fan of Samsung as a chip maker.
All the Exynos line uses ARM designed cores and licensed GPUs. Samsung designs the uncore only (similar to Apple with the A4 and A5 where they designed the SoC but integrated ARM designed cores)
Rumor has it Samsung is working on a custom 64 bit ARM core that will eventually replace the ARM designed A53/A57 in its Exynos line. I also saw rumors that project had run into trouble and was canceled, so who knows? Teams with the experience to design a complex modern CPU from scratch don't grow on trees, Apple was lucky to snap up PA Semi and Intrinsity to add that capability.
The Exynos 5433 shipped in some (non US/UK) versions of the Note 4 is 64 bit, but Samsung is keeping that on the down low, presumably because a lot of countries get the version using a 32 bit Qualcomm CPU and 64 bit Android hadn't been released when the Note 4 was.
I think you'll be a bit surprised if you actually do what you suggest and look up the history of ARM.
Apple (much as I personally dislike them) were instrumental in the formation of ARM from of the wreckage of Acorn, primarily to use the processor in the Apple Newton.
"Just remember these are chips designed by Apple, not Samsung , they are only producing them off apples design."
Or to put it another way:
Apple design a core, copying the core design features from ARM's IP, and then pay someone else to make it for them because they don't have the ability to fab their own designs, unlike Samsung.
Apple have more than enough money to build a 14nm fab, there must good reasons why they have not gone that route yet... The usual reasons are lack of skills & thin profit margins. In Apple's case the latter won't apply - so that leaves lack of skill / technical ability as the most likely show-stopper.
It is sad that many of (superficially) technically literate posters seem to be completely unaware of how much skill, knowledge & effort goes into building & running fabs. I'm guessing none of them have ever actually made anything in the real world.
In my experience foundries tend to only be a really viable option if you are an 800lb gorilla with massive orders (obviously Apple) or the stuff you are ordering is hardly time sensitive at all. The issue tends to be consumer demand hits all at once for everyone and the little guys are naturally at the back of the line. There are other issues as well but needless to say its not surprising even in the first world how many little 200mm mom and pop fabs are still around due to it being hideous expensive to build a new fab and foundries at times being mirages. Also a remarkable amount of the semiconductors today are still fabbed at above a micron process (granted not so much in phone SoC though).
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