“Apple has long been expected to move its A-series chip production from Samsung to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company,” Daniel Eran Dilger writes for AppleInsider. “This wasn’t expected to happen before next year, but mounting evidence suggests TSMC may already be building the unprecedented 64-bit A7 inside the iPhone 5s.”
“Perhaps the most convincing evidence of a TSMC-built A7 is that the news of Apple’s new 64-bit chip was also apparently news to Samsung. In fact, it was largely news to everyone,” Dilger writes. “Gearing up the production of a new SoC typically takes many months of intense collaboration, so even if Apple (as the fab client) were bringing in a fully custom chip design for ‘simple’ fabrication, it would still give Samsung a very long period of awareness of Apple’s overall game plan, something Samsung clearly appeared to lack with the A7.”
“Instead, in the months before the A7’s release, Samsung introduced its own 28nm, 32-bit “Octa-core” Exynos 5 as its vision of the state of the art in mobile Application Processors, in conjunction with the launch of its Galaxy S4 and then again for its even more recent Galaxy Note 3 phablet and Note 10.1 tablet released just a week before Apple’s iPhone 5s event,” Dilger writes. “The Exynos 5 Octa was such an expensive failure that Samsung couldn’t handle eating its own dog food within the most competitive market of Apple’s home continent. It’s not just big and inefficient, but appears to represent a dead end direction in mobile technology. It’s also failing to deliver any appreciable difference in performance to the extent that Samsung felt comfortable swapping it out with a more pedestrian Snapdragon in order to make the Galaxy S4 price more approachable. And sales were less than impressive despite this marketing bait and switcheroo.”
Reams more in the full article – recommended – here.
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