Interesting for those curious about the new processor. The fact that it's Samsung, a company supposedly at odds with Apple, isn't much of a story. It's not even news: (from July 1!)
They've provided parts to Apple for years, and their bottom line and stock price have been rewarded. (represents about 15-20% of their components sales)
The mobile division and the components divisions in the company operate fairly separately. That's why the oft commented, "They should just stop shipping parts to Apple to punish them for the lawsuit!" is kinda ridiculous.
What is interesting is that this reported $5B application processor contract with Samsung is likely drying up after the iPhone5S (plus next iPad rev?) as Apple transitions to TSMC. It therefore implies that all TSMC designs will likely be 64-bit, which will now likely change the planning for other pure-play foundries dreaming of that $5B order from Cupertino:
Just looking at that chart it seems like they aren't doing that great, how could that possibly be given they are doing so well in the mobile and laptop markets...
>>That's why the oft commented, "They should just stop shipping parts to Apple to punish them for the lawsuit!" is kinda ridiculous.
They can't just stop or they'll face bankruptcy by paying Apple damages. No doubt Apple made them sign an ironclad contract...and most likely a few years notice is part of it. Apple isn't stupid.
Not to mention that Samsung isn't doing Apple any favors, they're making a fortune because of the Apple contract. If they decide not to renew it, that's their prerogative but I'm sure Apple has plan A and B ready. Someone else will gladly take their money
While you are right, if a supplier is actively working against a customer, it is going to create problems. There are always a million things outside of the contract that matter. If the customer exceeds capacity planning volume, that gets resolved outside of the contract. Most suppliers will bend over backwards to help the customer. Will Samsung? Maybe.
If I were Apple, I'd prefer a supplier that has a natural incentive to be a great supplier rather than one that only has a contractual obligation. In the long term, contracts are as hollow as wedding vows. The relationship between a customer and supplier must be mutually beneficial with aligned interests.
I'm sure they'd be exploring alternatives ... But it's just the scale at which Samsung supplies them the chips that it's not seemingly possible for many other suppliers in the world ...
TSMC ships huge volumes, and that is indeed where apples manufacturing is rumored to be going. IIRC they recently signed a huge deal with them too. In this business though a mature process like samsungs 28nm High-K metal gate is quite valuable over a newer one like TSMC's 22nm.
I always felt they could take what ever the damages award ended up to be, divide that by the volume of chips they send Apple, And then raise the price per chip that much.
Don't not ship, just make sure that the patent damages don't cause any hit to the bottom line.
You're assuming the head of the chips department gives a fuck about what is happening to the mobile department. If the CEO where to step in and try to force the chips the people to screw with one of their best customer out of spite I'm pretty sure that wouldn't go down to well.
I always felt they could take what ever the damages award ended up to be
Like the other poster said, prices are almost certainly fixed--or else they'd face extortion as iPhone got more popular--but does anyone even dare calculate how much damages (including punitive) you have to pay Apple that's shipping some 100 million iPhones a year? Samsung and every corporation on earth would be bankrupt, not to mention that their stock would crash the minute word got out, almost certainly face DOJ, EU anti-trust and other issues etc etc.
Samsung singed the contract and they have to abide by it or else...
Not to start a war or anything, but Samsung decided to compete with their customer, not the other way around. Do we already need a reminder of pre-iPhone phones?
At NetApp, when I had visibility into the hardware building side of things we negotiated with Intel (our CPU supplier) on prices pretty much every year, and every time we added a new SKU to the mix. And when it became clear we were going to build systems with AMD parts those negotiations got a lot testier. And I don't doubt for a femptosecond that NetApp ended up having to pay more for their mid-range chips while they were shipping AMD chips in their high end filer.
I have no idea what goes on in the Samsung Microelectronics board room when Apple comes to call, but I would be astonished if the patent suits haven't changed Samsung's willingness to negotiate on price, and the base price they negotiate.
Samsung and Apple are both massive companies with an immense amount of overlap, so one of them boycotting the other would be like the US boycotting China. It just doesn't make sense.
Although it's only prudent that they still keep each-other at arms length, and scrutinize every business decision with the other.
True to some extent. Fundamentally Samsung is a Diversified company but Apple is very Focussed. Samsung electronics itself is so massive that one branch of it(LSI), depends on Apple for its volume which can keep its Fab busy for years. But, its other branch(Mobile) competes with Apple phones though. Similarly Apple depends on sammy only for its proven Fab and competitive Prices. Guess TSMC is no where near Sammys Fab technology and lost Apples deal.
Btw, Samsung is so massive and diversified that it is into areas like Construction, Ship Building, Finance, Automobile, Retail.
Its a very different company. It adapts to any domain, very fast. Few years back it became Top player in consumer electronics,last year it surpassed Apple in smart phones sales, had been a top player in Memory and tomorrow if space travel is the money spinner, it will be there.
You know Burj Khalifa, Taipei 101, Petronas are all built by Samsung ofcourse Samsung Engineering & Construction. So we need to mind which part of samsung we are talking about.
I had heard about conglomerates of course. But my first visit to South Korea, the totality of it blew my mind -- the cyberpunk future of company-nations coming out of Asia was real.
I remember that between getting off of the plane and going to bed, I had ridden in at least 2 Samsung built vehicles (a bus and a taxi -- dunno about the subway), shopped in a Samsung owned store, made some phone calls on a Samsung phone, got into a Samsung built apartment building and taken a Samsung elevator up to an apartment filled with Samsung appliances where I went to sleep watching news on a Samsung TV.
Later, on the same trip I experienced a very similar conglomerate built world in the form of LG and Daewoo, even getting a trip to a massive Daewoo ship building facility that cranked out - to spec - everything from oil tankers to submarines.
Back in the early 90's I bought a $30 VCR from some no-name foreign brand no one had ever heard of here in the US. 1/3 the price of the name brand stuff.
Then I went to Seoul and saw that same company brand on top of the largest skyscraper in the city - Daewoo.
I used to have Daewoo-branded home appliances (fridge, microwave) and my girlfriend at that time had a Daewoo car (branded as Chevrolet in some countries).
Btw, Samsung is so massive and diversified that it is into areas like Construction, Ship Building, Finance, Automobile, Retail
And the only one of them that's making big money right now is mobile. That's where most of Samsung's (and I mean the big diversified company, including building boats and selling insurance) income has been coming from the last 2 years.
Yeah, and Amazon's profit margins are notoriously and historically razor thin -- interestingly it's a matter of policy. Redirecting profits to other departments for maximizing revenue generation, which results in completely opaque expenditure/profit reports.
Mobile handsets may be the largest slice of the pie, but that's only because it's so easy to pad the margins.
Furthermore there is value to participating in other industries, even if only to break even. The expertise and business relationships are certainly contributing to Samsung's bottom line in ways other than revenue.
In terms of income ratio of Samsung, it is so focused on mobile business. Samsung mobile business income may beat rest of all samsung conglomerate incomes. Apple has been the biggest customer for Samsung FAB. As Apple were pulling out, it became like factory without running. Not sure why Apple chose both TSMC and Samsung fabs, may be gaining some bargain power, TSMC is one of the best. Qualcomm takes on the most advanced process with TSMC.
AP is designed by apple and they can always choose which fabrication facility to produce. Samsung FAB and mobile business are not in the same boat
The suggestion was that the relationship is mutually beneficial, not that it was bi-directional in terms of components traded.
Apple is like the USA to Samsung's China in this specific relationship in that the product (components in this case) pretty much goes one way, but both still rely on the relationship.
Samsung makes some of the components Apple needs, Apple buys those components. Apple needs Samsung for inexpensive chip fab, Samsung needs Apple for the revenue provided in return.
It's not a matter of needing each other. As long as there's a positive NPV on working together, they'll do it. They each might say, "We benefit X, but there's a risk that costs Y." As long as X is greater than Y, they'll work together. They don't have to, but as long as they're the best partners for a given transaction, why not?
"need" may not have been the be the best word to use there. I didn't mean to imply that either needs the other by the strictest sense of the word. I meant it more in the sense of "I need my morning coffee". I don't really need it, but I'd, you know, really, really like to have it.
I think you are overestimating how much Samsung needs Apple as a customer. Gigantic companies as Samsung are simultaneously active in any number of large markets. They do not need single customers, they do not even need whole markets. They are essentially investment holdings that will move out and into markets as they mature or are commoditized.
And if Samsung unilaterally ends their relationship with Apple it sets a dangerous precedent. If you knew that your trading partner would end their sale of products to you because you had a (valid or invalid) suit against one division of their business or had a product suite that competed with one of their division's product suites, would you want to do business with them or would you find someone that can actually play well with others?
How would you determine whether or not that was true about the next company? What about business that is ended between companies due to overlapping interests? That happens all the time.
Those were outside the hypothetical that was proposed (namely that Samsung could give up Apple as a customer and not notice it - presumably meaning longterm). Sure companies end relationships when they have overlapping interests, but sometimes they prop each other up as a result of that as well - see Microsoft's support of Apple in 1997, monetarily and with product support. It was apparently to their benefit to support a (failing) competitor, in this case I'm guessing it was to do with the anti-trust charges. But they were competitors at the same time.
In this particular case though (Samsung/Apple) the overlapping interest is part of Apple's core, and just one of many Samsung divisions. It would not be (or at least it's not obvious that it would be) in Samsung's interest to poison the well of their component division just because it happens that their phone division competes with Apple. Ditching Apple may not, on its own, be an issue after a couple years, but it would put other component customers on edge. See the concern some Android phone manufacturers had when Google bought Motorola's mobile division for a similar issue but from the software side.
The two businesses that Samsung is in that are making almost all of their money right now are semiconductors (and only flash and SOCs) and mobile handsets. Take those two businesses away and Samsung starts to look more like the ponderous, government-sheltered behemoth that it is.
And someone is going to take away the handset business - everyone in asia is basically waiting for Huawei and ZTE to eat Samsung's lunch. Samsung can't compete with either of them on cost, and eventually they won't be able to pump more pixels into 400+ppi screens to keep customers from buying cheaper smartphones. And without unique software to offer consumers (like Apple), Samsung is extremely vulnerable in the handset market.
And in the meantime, Samsung is amortizing a fortune's worth of chips fabs that were mostly built to supply components for iDevices.
I think it's a bit more nuanced than you are making out.
Samsung do have their own Software (Tizen, and Bada(?), and a third 'unknown' base). They are pushing for an Android compatible linux, with strong hardware integration. Huawei and ZTE won't be able to compete with that. They could fail completely on that strategy, but they are doing more than just increasing PPI.
Neither Tizen nor Bada are realistic competitors for Android outside of Korea. Certainly not anymore than Meego was an Android competitor - and Nokia actually had a lot of really great software engineers working for them. That's something that's hard to say about Samsung considering Touchwiz. And neither Bada nor Tizen has any significant ecosystem of apps.
This isn't a competitive edge against Huawei and ZTE because no one buys Samsung phones for their software.
Tizen can run android apps. So they have the largest ecosystem. Samsung has a huge brand, they could easily make Tizen a competitor by deploying it on Galaxy Phone in the future. Consumers wouldn't know (or care).
Not sure how you can judge a whole companies software engineers, based on one project (Touchwiz).
Tizen can run android apps. So they have the largest ecosystem.
No they don't. Android has the largest ecosystem. They're riding on Android's train - they don't have their own train. And they're on the Android train with Huawei. And if they're dumb enough to jump off the train, then they're in the bushes.
Samsung has a huge brand, they could easily make Tizen a competitor by deploying it on Galaxy Phone in the future. Consumers wouldn't know (or care)
No they couldn't. Brand doesn't count for anything if you're selling the same stuff your competitor is. Substitutability. The top phones from Apple, Samsung, and HTC offer more for more money than what Huawei can offer right now because there's room for mobile hardware innovation, and that's what they do best. Once they hit a ceiling - no more pixels to add to the screen, no more transistors on the CPU without exceeding a reasonable thermal envelope - then its all Huawei's game. The only one of those three that stands a chance is Apple because they have their own ecosystem.
Samsung has more brand recognition than Huawei. And it doesn't matter a whit. They'll still get steam-rolled once the ppi wars are over and we're buying based on price. This is the grim reality that Samsung shareholders have been realizing.
Not sure how you can judge a whole companies software engineers, based on one project (Touchwiz).
I've owned many Samsung products and have had no good experiences with their software or drivers. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but so far they seem to fit the stereotype of the hardware-company-that-doesn't-get-and-can't do-software.
They buy lots of chips and components from a company that's invested a lot of money to supply that demand. If Apple abruptly stopped or was forced to stop buying flash from Samsung, for example, Samsung would take a bath on their fab investments. Apple is easily their single biggest customer for flash and SOC fab production.
No, but there is evidence suggesting that they are about to partner with GlobalFoundaries, who is building another new fab in NY, supposedly for Apple demand.
I don't think that really describes this situation (competitors in one product market are often supply chain partners in another). However, I can really relate to your comment. As someone who considers myself to be more on the producer side of the consumer electronics equation, I'm often perplexed at how many consumers make these brands part of their identity, the way people were really passionate about what kind of shoes to wear back in the 80's! This sort of consumer excitement probably does benefit the producers.
If Apple starts getting marketshare, Apple wins and Samsung wins.
If Android starts getting marketshare. Samsung wins and Apple loses.
I bet each production cycle Apple starts threatening it will manufacture its own chips and it starts to feed the rumor mill. Samsung gets nervous and gives them a very good deal.
Even if Samsung's profit margin drops significantly, it's still going to look much much better to the markets than if they lose their Apple contract.
"If Android starts getting marketshare. Samsung wins and Apple loses."
This is conventional wisdom and at some level of course it's true but in general I think it's misleading. The fact is that the markets Apple and Samsung are in are not identical. The market Apple competes in roughly equates with the top third of the smartphone market. Samsung competes in the entire phone market. It's quite possible for both to gain market share at the same time in their respective markets. And even if they weren't it's possible for both to lose market share but still be successful because the market for smartphones itself is increasing rapidly.
The way I look at it, is that Apple is trying to have its way by shopping between Samsung, TSMC, and any others. Their leverage doing this comes from offering bulk purchases, or in the case of LCDs, helping to finance large capital expenditures. Their biggest worry right now is that Samsung's competition doesn't seem able to compete, at least at scale.
At the end of the day though, if push ever comes to shove, there isn't much they couldn't afford to buy outright, even their own fabs. I was holding out hope that they were trying to save 200B to build out their own wireless infrastructure, but they could conceivably buy control of Intel instead.
Keep in mind that the ARM processor space operates on razor thin margins, and Apple's iPhone business does not. Also it has been rumored for a long time that apple is moving most of its chip fab business to TSMC, but I suspect their waiting for the next process node before making the jump. A company that values reliability like apple prefers a mature process.
I work with a fair number of (awesome!) Korean engineers, and I can say that yes, Samsung has a lot of fanboys. It's sort of like the Apple of Korea. It's also been gaining a lot of admiration from A/V enthusiasts in the States, having easily supplanted Sony as the high-end consumer electronics maker of choice for TVs and such.
Samsung is a very impressive company. It doesn't use the Nike-esque marketing playbook Apple does, and as such, it doesn't inspire the hero worship or the fanaticism in the States. But it's been quietly building up a massive empire.
[Full disclosure: I say this as an Apple fanboy, and as the resident iOS 7 apologist at my office (everyone here's firmly on Team Android). I own plenty of Apple and Samsung devices, and I don't feel the need to declare absolute brand loyalty to any one provider.]
It always amuses me to see how much vitriol comes from anti-apple folks, when, if they were living in Korea and held the exact same standards, they would likely have equal hate for Samsung. Their vertical and horizontal control on their home turf dwarfs Apple's. But no, it's just a foreign company that has managed to do wonders somehow. As a chaebol, Samsung got where they are now thanks to very favorable government assistance, that, if occurred here, would be considered pretty controversial.
While I agree with a lot of your points, I'm a little puzzled by this one:
"It always amuses me to see how much vitriol comes from anti-apple folks..."
Was I the intended recipient of that description? I'd hardly call myself "anti-Apple," nor would I say I've engaged in "vitriol" directed at Apple. Almost the complete opposite, in fact. :)
In my reading that wasn't directed at you, but the general "wake up sheeple" type comments you often find directed at people making pro-apple comments.
You did a great job, summed up my thoughts. If I wasn't an Apple kind of guy, I'm sure I'd have an S4.
samsung is a lot like sony in the pre rootkit days. Most people knew they were there and bought their stuff because it was good. No marketing crap, no media circus or hype, they just churn out usable stuff in lots of industries.
Apple thrives on publicity and hype, its part of their image and its polarising.
I'm sorry, it's Friday and I'm a little exhausted, so my sarcasm meter is on the fritz. Apologies if I'm inducing a facepalm in saying this, but...
Nike's playbook -- as made famous by Phil Knight in the 70s, 80s, and 90s -- was to market a lifestyle, not a shoe. Nike is an incredibly innovative marketing company, and Steve Jobs himself fondly referenced Phil Knight's work at Nike as inspiration for how he thought about marketing at Apple.
Accounting for 20% of South Korea's GDP and having been involved in a number of bribery and wire tapping controversies with former Prime Ministers and government officials, Samsung is too big to fail and they know it.
They are the Goldman Sachs of the electronics industry. The Korean government and the Korean people will never let Samsung fail. Having such a sturdy safety net means they can take some very bold risks and those have really paid off for them.
Maybe that sort of government guarantee is the only way to compete in a field like semiconductors.
Building a fab and developing semi technologies requires a huge amount of capital, but if a competitor comes up with a better process you lose your lunch. That doesn't mean that in the next generation you won't be out ahead though.
Intel seem to do pretty well without a government to bail them out, but the other players are all deeply intertwined with their governments.
Maybe high tech manufacturing is an industry where it is hard for free market countries to compete, hence its flight from the west. Actually, a lot of technological success on the US is built on the back of its military industrial complex.
Is deep government involvement required for technological development? (Specifically the needs R&D and money, not the many small bets found here). If so, wouldn't it be nice if our engine for funding that wasn't built around war.
Intel has been a phenomenal success story without major government assistance (that I know of, at least). But I guarantee that the government would bail it out if it ever fell on hard times. We seem to be entering a new era of international protectionism, and I suspect that more subsidies, protections, and tariffs are on the way.
Whether government investment or assistance is necessary for deep technological R&D is a really interesting question. A preponderance of our hardware (and many of our software) advances, even in the private sector, were built on the back of major government R&D investment. As you've pointed out, a lot of this has come from the military-industrial complex.
Our major companies (other than Goldman Sachs and its peers) don't receive the same level of protection that the Korean chaebol, or the Japanese Big Four, or the Chinese or even French conglomerates do. But that may change in the near to distant future. It will depend upon our domestic firms' abilities to compete on an international playing field that is increasingly turning toward the chaebol model, and not so much the free-market model.
Reporters should ask Tim Cook the following question:
"Does Apple make anything which is best-in-class which other companies need?".
The answer is obvious. No.
> "Chipworks also found the new M7 motion coprocessor inside the iPhone 5s, which is labeled as the NXP LPC18A1. It's based on the LPC1800 series Cortx-M3 microcontrollers made by NXP. As for the enhanced camera in the iPhone 5s, the iSight module was discovered to be a custom Exmor-RS sensor from Sony. Other parts in the handset include a touchscreen controller from Broadcom, an LTE modem by Qualcomm, and NAND flash from SK Hynix."
Best in class products from Apple which companies use include the iPhone, iPad and their laptops. If you're just pointing out that Apple isn't a component maker, I'm not sure what the point is other than trivia.
edit: To clarify, I mean this because the A7 is a custom design that just happens to be fabbed by Samsung under contract, rather than an off-the-shelf component, like the M7, that has simply been granted a marketing buzzword. Other OEMs will not simply be able to integrate the A7 in their products for this reason.
My favorite part about this is that Gruber has been repeating the speculation that the chip was not manufactured by Samsung. He turned out to be wrong. When others are wrong with their "Claim Chowder" (as he likes to call it) he shits all over then. But this is all you get from him when he is wrong: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/09/20/a7
Gruber reported the speculation as just that - speculation. He didn't write crazy opinions about how 'Samsung was doomed' or how 'Samsung's CEO should step down' etc. etc.
His swift acknowledgement of when he was wrong was entirely appropriate.
The people who be calls out with 'claim chowder' make ludicrous assertions, and never acknowledge they were wrong.
He has used that speculation to kind of refute other people's different speculations. So he did more than just report it... he bought into it and used it to tell other people they were wrong.
I'm disappointed. I thought you would link to something where he told someone that they were wrong. Instead, he said conditionally that if the speculation pans out, then he "may be" wrong about a reason why something was observed. It wasn't a refutation, but just offering an alternative hypothesis.
That seems like a perfectly guarded statement, self-aware of its speculative basis.
How do you know? I always thought journalists had some basic level principles about their jobs, until I heard from a first hand witness that you can actually buy some of them with good money...
Let me figure this out: Samsung manufactures Touchscreen, CPUs and perhaps other chips for Apple, yet Apple sue them from time to time over software patents and design ideas.
Gigantic multinational megaconglomerates are, well, huge. They may operate under the same overall banner, but operationally they tend to be almost fully independent entities. Many are legally distinct corporations with their own finances, budgets, and operations.
Apple employing the component manufacturing arm of Samsung can occur simultaneously with Apple suing the consumer device design arm.
That is a great way to damage Samsung for Apple. Initially contracting them with a very high-volume and then dropping off to zero. Samsung will make a huge net-loss, if they don't partner up with Microsoft(=Nokia now) or Google in another big deal.
Samsung is actually having trouble meeting their own internal demand for components. IIRC, they were even getting memory from arch-rival Hynix at some point this year. Having Apple dial back might not be such a bad thing for Samsung if it helps sort out their internal supply chain.
Samsung has long sourced externally for parts. Despite being (one of?) the worlds biggest LCD panel vendors many of their TVs had non-Samsung panels in them at least a few years ago. It was particularly the mid-low ranges.
Not true, contract component manufacturing made only 7% of Samsung profits last year. The value of the Samsung branded smartphones they ship out is by far their most important financial metric.
I don't think Apple is as interested in being punitive (though some of it might be that) as they are in diversifying supply sources. It's probably unlikely that TSMC will exclusively build them right away, but Apple may shift more over to them if they do a good job.
Say you sell lumber, and I sell furniture, and buy a lot of my raw materials from you. You start making furniture too, and your furniture seems a little too inspired by mine, maybe going over the line of what's legal, so I sue you. However, your lumber is still top quality despite that, so I keep buying your lumber even while suing you over your furniture.
In your example, 15-20% of your lumber sales are to me, so regardless of what happens with the furniture situation, you still want to keep selling me lumber. It's a symbiotic relationship.
If you've ever worked at a company with more than a single employee, surely you've noticed that not all employees necessarily know what the other employees are doing.
Now imagine that scaled up to a giant corporation, with hundreds of thousands of employees, and multiple independent divisions with their own goals, strategies, and financial responsibilities.
Yes, when you are working with a company and sharing trade secrets only to have them turn around and take those secrets to make their own devices that compete directly with yours and then they make commercials making fun of said products and your customers, that doesn't really help the business relationship.
I keep hearing this. What are those 'secrets' that you are talking about (Any link which gives specific information?) Samsung has been making phones much before Apple has been. Are those secrets "Rounded phone corners", "icons in a grid", "Slide to Unlock", or "jumping scrollbar"?
If you really think Apple has contributed nothing more to the modern smartphone than 'rounded corners', this is not the appropriate place to ask this question because you risk being mistaken for someone trying to start a flamewar. I recommend quora instead.
It can't have hurt the relationship that bad if Apple haven't sourced a new provider. If I were Apple I'd pull the contract on principle but I'm sure financial forces are at play here.
They are doing everything the can to source a new provider. There just aren't that many people who have the manufacturing capacity to produce these chips at scale.
Samsung does a lot of things. They build ships. The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Well, it does, but it can't do anything about it. This is a big company.
Companies as big as Apple and Samsung have gotten over their egos in favor of profits. Just because one company is suing the other, in no way prevents them from entering other mutually beneficial agreements.
Somehow, companies like Apple (and nVidia) get to call themselves "completely vertically integrated" even though they don't own any fabs. I've never understood this.
I never saw Apple call itself this way, but I can be wrong, I believe it's more of an Apple rumors thing, like some years ago some people were telling how Apple would just put it's custom designed CPU on Macbooks and build everything by itself, including GPU.
This happened even here in HN, I think these guys are the equivalent of the MS fans back at the time of the dot-com bubble telling how MS would rule the world.
Samsung is considered completely vertically integrated by many, even though they don't mine their own raw materials or operate their own power plants to power their factories. I've never understood that either.
I've always heard "vertically integrated" as a separate category from "IC design house". Supply chains are long and the endpoints vary depending on the context.
The last SoC where this has been the case is the A5 (using the the ARM Cortex-A9 MP). The Apple A6 and A7 don't use ARM cores and neither does Qualcomm in their Snapdragon SoCs.
I'm not sure how this is significant. Many of Apple's core technologies and hardware are produced by Samsung or with Samsung's help, e.g. Retina display for MacBook Pro, A4 and previous chips, and SSDs in the MacBook Pro and MacBook Aero.
It's quite disappointing to see this on the frontpage, in all honesty.
I agree. I feel like I see this posted all the time (in comments on various threads) and there's always a large group that is shocked and/or don't understand.
At a guess, I imagine it's really difficult to rip off a chip design just by looking at raw circuit designs (unless you're copying the entire chip). Wouldn't it take a great amount of expertise to look at some plans for a chip and say "oh, that's why it works so well!"?
It works so well mostly because it works only with other Apple hardware and software. They have up to 10 designs to optimize. That are fairly close to each other.
Up until the A5 the chips were designed and built by Samsung (from relatively standard ARM references). Apple hasn't done anything particularly exciting since.
It uses ARM v8 and Samsung's 28nm process and Imagination's series 6 GPU, which is all very exciting for chip nerds, but not for Samsung, who provides one, is a leading licencee of another and could buy the third if it wants to, so what's left to steal?
The CPU? ARMv8 isn't a thing, it's an instruction set specification, just like x86, implemented by various micro-architectures. Samsung doesn't do that (yet).
Most prior Apple designs have been close to stock ARM core implementations coupled with a PowerVR GPU. There hasn't been much if anything to steal, given that Samsung also licenses PowerVR GPUs and is also an ARM licensee.
The A7 is interesting in that it's the first mainstream 64-bit part, but I see Samsung being far more interested in the A53/A57 (designs that Samsung gets straight from ARM) than the A7. The A7, if rumors are true, is a sort of hybrid approach to use one of the next generation, 64-bit ARM cores early, similar to what Qualcomm does.
EDIT: ARM nomenclature is such a mess. The A7 runs ARMv7 or ARMv8 using a sort-of A57 dual-core architecture, but should not be confused with the ARMv7 Cortex-A7.
The A7 is not a hybrid approach. A7 is an ARMv8 chip (it implements the ARMv8 ISA), but not an ARM design (that's the difference between the processor license (can use ARM-designed cores) and the architecture license (can design own core implementing ARM ISA). Apple and Qualcomm have both licenses. There's nothing "hybrid" about using your architecture license.
ARMv8 provides two architectures: AArch64 and AArch32. Implementors can implement either or both. AArch64 is the brand new architecture while AArch32 is backwards-compatible with ARMv7-A. If both are implemented, it's possible to switch between AArch32 and AArch64 on the fly at specific change points, giving the ability to run AArch32 (= ARMv7) applications seamlessly on an AArch64 kernel (or an AArch32 guest os in an AArch64 hypervisor).
Unless you work at Apple in silicon design, you don't know that, and to be fair neither do I. But history has shown that every A# release gets greeted with incredible fanfare about the completely-custom CPU work at Apple, to later quietly get corrected when it turns out that it is at most a marginally derived ARM core.
I'm just going with history. Given that the A57 finished design last year, and started taping out early this year, it seems unlikely -- if not strategically risky -- that Apple just went their own way. From a pure performance perspective, ARM is hyping a clock-for-clock tripling of performance with the A57 over a Cortex-A15, or a quintupling of performance at a given power usage level.
>> Unless you work at Apple in silicon design, you don't know that, and to be fair neither do I. But history has shown that every A# release gets greeted with incredible fanfare about the completely-custom CPU work at Apple, to later quietly get corrected when it turns out that it is at most a marginally derived ARM core.
His hasn't been true since the A6, which (amongst others) chipworks confirmed is a full custom design, manually laid out even, which proves it is not a modified reference ARM design. I don't think Apple would invest hundreds of millions acquiring chip design shops, gradually move from increasingly customized reference designs to full custom designs, to throw their brand new Swift core out after one generation and start over with a reference design. So I think it's pretty safe to assume the A7 is a pimped up A6 that implements armv8.
I'm not sure why you're so skeptical about Apple designing their own ARM cores, they've been going further down this path since after acquiring Intrinsity and PA-Semi, and they are not the only ones doing this, Qualcomm, nvidia and previously TI also design full custom ARM cores.
> The A7 runs ARMv7 or ARMv8 using a sort-of A57 dual-core architecture
I understood your use of the word "hybrid" as applying to the ARMv7 compatibility in an ARMv8 chip (which there's nothing hybrid about, since it's part of ARMv8's features).
And apparently you intended it as "Apple's custom chips are relatively minor customizations of standard ARM designs", which you seem to think of as a hybrid between using standard designs and designing from scratch.
It's also fun that they found the M7, considering that the initial teardown left iFixit with the impression that it was just some marketing buzzword for a part of the A7. As has been mentioned in the thread, it is still an off-the-shelf component, but at least we know the truth now (that the "M7" really still is a separate IC).
IMHO Samsung and Apple compete on marketing and not in technology. That's why you can find Samsung chips in Apple devices.
So, the vertical integration Samsung has in the manufacturing process is not great competitive advantage. However, Apple is strongly vertical integrated in the retail side. This makes a difference.
Samsung as a chip fab is not the same Samsung that designs phones. They fall under the same name umbrella, but likely they have individual targets to meet annually, and Apple is one of the biggest chip consumers in town. It's a good fit, I never get why people are surprised by that.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732468220457851...
They've provided parts to Apple for years, and their bottom line and stock price have been rewarded. (represents about 15-20% of their components sales)
The mobile division and the components divisions in the company operate fairly separately. That's why the oft commented, "They should just stop shipping parts to Apple to punish them for the lawsuit!" is kinda ridiculous.
When it was RUMORED that Samsung lost a significant contract for Apple chips to a competitor, they lost $10B in market cap: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/16/us-samsung-chips-i...