“ARM and TSMC have announced a new multi-year agreement in order to develop ARM-based processors which are based on TSMC 10FinFET process technology,” Charlie Osborne reports for ZDNet. “The companies announced the new agreement on Thursday. The firms said that success in scaling from 20SoC to 16FinFET and the popularity of such technology influenced the new deal, and both ARM and TSMC will collaborate again for 10FinFET. ARM and TSMC hope that developing the roadmap early will result in 10FinFET designs as early as Q4 2015.”
“TSMC, also known as Taiwan Semiconductor, will base the new networking chips on 20SoC and 16FinFET in the ARM ecosystem in order to improve both performance and power consumption levels in next generation hardware,” Osborne reports. “Using a technique TSMC calls CoWoS (chip-on-wafer-on-substrate), the Taiwanese firm is able to combine different process nodes on a single substrate — which results in smaller hardware.”
Read more in the full article here.
I wonder if this means Apple could skip 16-14 and go from 20 to 10 in one generation. Will 10 capacity be enough in 2015? Seems doubtful.
Well, Samsung is claiming to be producing the A9 chip for Apple likely at the 14nm process. Although it would be nice to skip Samsung an the next process and go from 20 to 10nm.
perfect time to skip and good reason why – hurray
Lets hope Apple gains this too… can not see why not, as ARM and Apple have worked closely before. However, this news some what says 64 bit could available to the competitors.
Squeezing the size down from 20 to 10 would be advantageous to Apple just the same. Look for thinner A9 M9 iPhone 7 ‘s to come.
With projection screens and holographic keyboards — please.
Time line for such technology means this is for A10 CPU or even A11 so sadly SameSung will continue to be in the picture with Apple.
The earliest the chips will be available in limited quantities is Q4 2015 – too late for the next iPhone.
I’d like to see Apple develop a sameshit trade-up program where you can pay an extra few bucks to get a phone without any sameshit chips.