Apple and Samsung Already Working On A9 Processor 114
itwbennett writes According to a report in Korean IT Times, Samsung Electronics has begun production of the A9 processor, the next generation ARM-based CPU for iPhone and iPad. Korea IT Times says Samsung has production lines capable of FinFET process production (a cutting-edge design for semiconductors that many other manufacturers, including AMD, IBM and TSMC, are adopting) in Austin, Texas and Giheung, Korea, but production is only taking place in Austin. Samsung invested $3.9 billion in that plant specifically to make chips for Apple. So now Apple can say its CPU is "Made in America."
Lawsuit pending (Score:4, Funny)
Milo Minderbinder (Score:4, Insightful)
The byzantine balance of relationships between Samsung and Apple seem beyond even Milo Minderbinder's capacity for finding vested interests between mortal enemies.
Milo Minderbinder (Score:1)
These chips are actually made in malta. They just move them here to get a better price.
Re:Milo Minderbinder (Score:4, Insightful)
It's no different than Netflix and Amazon. Amazon Prime and Netflix are direct competitors but Netflix streaming is hosted on AWS
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Apple has a patent on chips that are rectangular.
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I think that's nominally true for CPUs designed from the ground up. Given that chip's taking most of it's cues from reference designs by ARM themselves... I think this is less of the usual case.
Re:Processors take 4-5 years to design. (Score:5, Informative)
apple and qualcomm are custom designs that run the ARM instruction set. only three other companies in the world have that license. everyone else gets to make the ARM reference design
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Is there a 'let me wikipedia that for you' link?
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There's a great website called LMGTFY... :)
But, as a FYI, Apple was one of the founders of ARM, so it stands to reason Apple would have access to any kind of licensing they wanted.
http://www.linleygroup.com/new... [linleygroup.com] is from 2012, and is pretty accurate.
List of third-party ARM cores (Score:5, Informative)
List of third-party implementations of ARM architecture [wikipedia.org] shows Qualcomm Snapdragon (ARMv7), Apple A series (ARMv8), Applied Micro X-Gene (ARMv8), NVIDIA Denver (ARMv8), and Cavium ThunderX (ARMv8). Everything else is ARM's own Cortex reference design.
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+1 for providing a specific detailed answer to a reasonable question. The mist anybody else could do was self righteous snark. Typing lmgtfy! doesn't make for an insightful comment...
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Get bent.
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thank you for your insightful comment! I feel truly honored by your presence.
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there are 5 ARM architecture licenses in the world which let you build the ARM instructions into your own custom design
everyone else has the vanilla license where you can use the reference design with minor changes allowed
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I think that's nominally true for CPUs designed from the ground up. Given that chip's taking most of it's cues from reference designs by ARM themselves... I think this is less of the usual case.
Well, if "that chip's taking most of it's cues from reference designs by ARM" - why the hell is it so different from all other ARM chips? Why is it still the only 64bit ARM chip shipping?
Re:Really.. (Score:4, Insightful)
No, but they might have spent $3.9B so they can say its CPU is not "Made in China" and have a Chinese company "procure" the designs and start making the next gen chips based on the tech, while also having to worry about grey market versions of Samsung and Apple devices that utilize the processor.
If they can control a key component of the device (and "made in america" certainly provides that), then they can minimize grey market goods impact on their branded devices by potentially relegating them to an inferior parts chain.
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Actually, Samsung owns a fab in Texas that makes Apple SoCs - and that's all it does.
And that's been the case for a few years now, even through the Samsung-Apple patent spat.
It's a complex relationship, to the say the least -
Re:Really.. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yep, I work for a company that actually makes flash memory and a lot of it is sold to Samsung. This gives Samsung a second source if they need increased volume without investing in another flash fab, and some of our product types (yes, there are many types of flash memory and implementations of it) are not made by Samsung so it's cheaper for them to buy it from us.
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Its a smart business method. My conglomerate group used to do the internal thing, but the past decade has consisted of making sure each business unit functions acceptably in the market on its own. The sister companies compete with outside clients for jobs, etc. It ensures that you don't end up with a bloated business unit riding on the laurels of another. When that happens, you get a single point of failure for all business units.
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Huh interesting points... I would have guessed that this might be a ploy for Apple to grab some of the military-industrial complex work. I've never seen apple junk in the defense sector before, but if they can get security officers to begin insisting on using US-sourced electronics, then Apple has a honey pot of high margin contracts to reap.
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Why's that, eh? ICs made from wood not good enough for you, eh?
Seeing as it's Texas... is it "discrete mesquite"? (Score:2)
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Sure, an IP-disrespecting competitor will then have to learn through trial and error how to actually manufacture the new tech in the chip, but reverse-engineering an existing thing is often easier than coming up with it in the first place.
Re:Apple not working on adding more RAM to iPhone (Score:4, Funny)
Seriously, 1 GB of RAM? Still?
I agree, with QEMM, 640K ought to be enough for anybody. Who needs 1GB.
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That way they will always have a ready market of users waiting to upgrade. They did the same thing with the big phones. The demand was there for years but they carried on selling small form phones till the market for small form phones is going to fall. Then when they release the big phones, boom!! the pent-up demand guarantee increased sale.
Not hardly.
"Big phones" was a private "thing" with the then-CEO. I think his last name was "Jobs".
Considering the timing of SJ's demise, relative to the introduction of the iPhone 5, then 6 and 6 Plus, I would venture to say that Apple approved the iPhone 5 (the first "big" iPhone) as a sort of "marketing test" on the very day that Steve J. stopped breathing.
Remember, it takes TIME to approve new case designs, displays, etc; not to mention new SoCs to drive the extra pixels. It isn't like you just put
Not just a phone (Score:3)
says the user of a phone OS that requires more than 1GB of RAM.
If I wanted just a phone, I'd buy a flip phone and pay a lower monthly bill. People buy iPhone or Android devices instead of flip phones because they want a multi-purpose* mobile computing device.
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It's true!! It's all true!
Apple Pushing All Mobile CPU Vendors (Score:5, Funny)
What I see in this is Apple is NOT letting up their push for better CPU/Graphics.
The long term plan is obviously to be able to DOMINATE through superiority.
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The long term plan is to run iOS on laptops and desktops, or have you not been paying attention? This is why Apple has stopped caring about POSIX, and has put all of its efforts into the iOS runtime environment--UI, toolchain, etc. OS X is a second-class citizen.
Riiiight.
...And the list for Mountain Lion [apple.com], only a year or so before Mavericks.
Apple isn't paying any attention to poor-old OS X [apple.com]. Neglected, it is... NOT!
And here's the list for Mavericks [apple.com], released only a year earlier.
Now, let's see the comparable list for Windows 7 to 8.1, which covers MORE time (by far!) (2009 to 2014) than the time-period between OS X 10.8 to 10.10 (2012 to 2014).
So, keep on hating, hater. Meanwhile, Apple continues happily along, walking AND chewing-gum at the same time (sig
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The long term plan is to run iOS on laptops and desktops, or have you not been paying attention? This is why Apple has stopped caring about POSIX, and has put all of its efforts into the iOS runtime environment--UI, toolchain, etc. OS X is a second-class citizen.
http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3607.htm [opengroup.org]
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The long term plan is to run OS X on it.
While I'm not sure I'd welcome that on anything smaller than the iPhone 6 Plus, it WOULD be wonderful to be able to download a version of OS X that was designed with a slightly different UI layer that was targeted for certain classes of iOS devices (e.g. Tablets).
But I understand why that gets to be "a bit much" for a company; because not only do they have to develop it (which is kind of trivial for them, due to the way that iOS and OS X are built); but more importantly, they would have to test and SUPPOR
Docked phone (Score:4, Interesting)
The vast majority of what's different between iOS and OSX is the UI
That and end users' inability to configure iOS's Gatekeeper.
and the OSX UI wouldn't be appropriate in any way for a phone.
How would the OS X UI be inappropriate for a phone docked to a Bluetooth keyboard and AirPlay monitor? The docked phone's touch screen would behave like a trackpad. Or how would it be inappropriate for an iPad with a clip-on keyboard and trackpad?
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How would the OS X UI be inappropriate for a phone docked to a Bluetooth keyboard and AirPlay monitor? The docked phone's touch screen would behave like a trackpad. Or how would it be inappropriate for an iPad with a clip-on keyboard and trackpad?
It would be squinty, or it would use a lot of screen real estate just like it did on teeny tiny macs back in the day.
ARM for desktop/laptop (Score:1)
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That's only two switches. Count the arrows!
Well, it depends.
You could almost legitimately count the 16 -> 32 bit transition of the 68k MacOS as nearly equivalent to a "Platform Change". They essentially had to do a complete rewrite on the Macintosh Toolbox, on QuickDraw, on QuickTime, and the OS itself, not to mention all the developers that had to re-do their applications to be "32 bit Clean" (remember that?).
Shoot, MS is STILL trying to sort out 32 vs 64 bit for Windows; and their "solution" is about as fugly as fugly gets!
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They went 680x0 -> PowerPC 6xx -> x86.
You forgot the ARM port of significant portions of OS X (specifically the XNU/Darwin portions?).
So that makes THREE, no FOUR "Ports".
Actually, it is three; but still pretty cool.
I remember SJ standing up at a WWDC keynote right after the (essentially flawless) Intel transition of OS X,saying "Our engineers have worked long an hard to turn THIS (shows an OS X Desktop (ostensibly running on PPC)) to THIS (Ripple-Transition to an identical OS X Desktop (ostensibly running on Intel)). Crowd goes wild. Ver
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Apple would want to avoid a Windows RT debacle. Rebadging the mac mini as an ARM HTPC might work, where there's no confusion it'll run amd64 Photoshop.
If developers are (have been recently) still producing fat binaries for PPC, adding a checkbox for ARMv8 in Xcode doesn't seem a stretch.
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That's probably not what he means. It's been hypothesized [mondaynote.com] and rumored [macrumors.com] that Apple will eventually move all their laptops and desktops away from Intel and use ARM as the CPU. Intel has been behind schedule delivering next-generation chips, which leads to the conclusion that Apple would want to control its own destiny with its own CPUs.
They won't do that until Windows runs full-blown Windows (NOT RT) on ARM (and has some sort of JIT), which it does NOT seem that MS is particularly interested in making happen. RT was designed from the get-go to be a stepchild, at best, of "real Windows", and it looks like that's what it is going to stay.
Apple sells not an insignificant number of desktop and laptop machines because of being able to dual-boot (and do VM) for other OSes (primarily Windows and Linux), and to be frank, that requires Intel (an
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Uh, a dual core 1.3Ghz cpu is "marginally superior" to phones running quad and octo cores at twice the clock speed?! You don't consider that superior performance?
If Apple were to create another version of their phone, but with 4000mAh to 8000mAh batteries (to support the extra GHz and cores without draining the batteries too fast), they can make their phones twice to 4 times as fast, just by upping the Ghz, or the number of cores, or both.
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Not being in frontal competition with all the vendors they can make something that makes sense, other CPU have 4 or 8 cores and 1.x to 2.x GHz but they're always clocked down and with cores turned off, so the advantages (like what, running a raytracer on your phone?) are very theoretical.
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"If Samsung were to create another version of their flagship phone, but with 4000mAh to 8000mAh batteries (to support the extra GHz and cores without draining the batteries too fast), they can make their phones twice to 4 times as fast, just by upping the Ghz, or the number of cores, or both."
See how easy that was? When it comes right down to it, the processors are on par within the total thermal/power envelope presented by the form factor and battery technology. If we've learning anything since the days of
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What amazes me is that in all the years Apple has been making smartphones, it's still impossible to add a music file from email to itunes on the phone.
It's not really amazing if you think of it in the right context: Any music not acquired via RIAA-approved methods must be piracy, according to the RIAA. Ripping CDs is allowed, but only grudgingly, because it was already being done before they knew it could be a "problem". P2P file sharing (aka Napster and its many descendants) is right out.
Also, e-mail? Of all the ways to get music files, that doesn't really seem convienent. Do you watch Netflix movies via e-mail? Just because you could do something doesn
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Wow. Just how does your brain work? The point is that Apple's iPhone, using 2 cores at 1.3Ghz has comparable performance to high end Android phones running at 4 to 8 cores at twice the Ghz, and in my mind, that's superior performance.
Just which part of that argument do you not get?
And the second part - if Apple were to use the same amount of cores or Ghz as the competition, assuming linear scalability, their performance would be double or quadruple of similar high end Android phones.
Simply replacing Apple
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Uh, a dual core 1.3Ghz cpu is "marginally superior" to phones running quad and octo cores at twice the clock speed?!
Cores and clock speed is hardly the only determinant of performance. It sets a hard upper bound, but that can be readily squandered by software.
In the case of Android phones, they pushed for extra cores early on to avoid UI stutter during garbage collection cycles. iOS has never provided garbage collection; you either have to setup your own retain/release calls to keep or relinquish objects, or you use ARC (Automatic Reference Counting) to do more or less the same thing.
In effect, it's a trade-off. Googl
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Did you see that Google/Android developer who asked why does Android need a dual/quad core Ghz cpu to have the same level of performance as a 400Mhz iPhone 4 (this post was made last year or the year before, obviously).
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You know that. I know that. But since marketing want to play that way, let them... :)
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The long term plan is obviously to be able to DOMINATE through superiority.
I had to think about this and then realized you were not saying something obvious.
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No, their plan is to make iOS so slow that it only runs on new CPU. Like they do with every new release...
Planned obsolescence.
Made in America! (Score:3, Funny)
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Mostly Europeans, particularly from Spain, refer to all of the Americas as "America." Until they are corrected by Canadians or Mexicans who resent being lumped in with people from the United States, which has owned the term "America" from hundreds of years.
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norteamericano, estadounidense, yanqui, gringo...
americano can also refer to a weak black coffee.
What it's like to own an Apple product (Score:2, Troll)
Wooo! (Score:1)
>Samsung has production lines capable of FinFET process production (a cutting-edge design for semiconductors that many other manufacturers, including AMD, IBM and TSMC, are adopting)
Wooo! Cutting edge! Or maybe that's the same finfet technology Intel has been casually making in high yield production since Ivy Bridge.
Intel hampered by emulator overhead (Score:2)
Or maybe that's the same finfet technology Intel has been casually making in high yield production since Ivy Bridge.
In the real world, theoretical performance matters less than observed performance on the specific applications that end users want to run on a device. How well do Intel's FinFET CPUs run the existing library of games and other proprietary ARM-native apps for phones and tablets that aren't yet available as fat binaries? Is its ARM-to-x86 JIT up to even half the performance of native code yet?
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No, because Ivy Bridge was 22nm and this is 14nm
Made in America... (Score:2, Funny)
...by a bunch of cheap H1B's
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Not only that, but hiring an H1B involves large delays in when they can start, and it's far from a given that the visa will even be granted at all (I think fewer than 50% are granted each year). Americans have a huge 'home ground' advantage over H1B applicants - you have to be seriously "uncompetitive" if you can't compete with all the extra costs and extra delays and extra risks involved in hiring an H1B. The H1B's I know are extremely hard-working (and all earn well over 100k/year).
I think the relevant points got left out... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the relevant points got left out... the summary missed the most interesting parts:
1G L2 - all of graphics memory now fits in the L2 cache
14nm design - someone needs to update Wikipedia; they can probably clock it faster than the op speed listed there
Quad core - this thing may be in the next MacBook Air
Memory bus - Apple's memory bus is still faster than everyone else's by a mile; pays to have the Alpha->NetScaler->PA Semi guys on the payroll
This things is probably going to beat the pants off every other ARM chip in a while. Oh yeah, forgot: they're already sampling.
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People that bash Apple always get really quiet when it comes to mobile chip tech. Apple mobile devices are saddled with chips that are several generations ahead of their nearest competitors.
The launch of the 5s Apple absolutely blindsided the entire industry with the A7. A 64bit arm chip shipping in a flagship product that sold almost 3 million units in the first 24 hours. Nobody was else even /sampling/ 64 bit arm processors. Most did not even have 64 bit on their roadmap save a few server targeted chips.
V
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Actually, Apple didn't do it for memory, they did it because AArch64 is a more efficient architecture. I.e., it's a lot faster. ARMv8 over ARMv7 running 32-bit code is on
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Nobody was else even /sampling/ 64 bit arm processors. Most did not even have 64 bit on their roadmap save a few server targeted chips.
Very forward looking behavior from apple. You're going to need 64 bit to use more than 2GB of ram without major pain (32 bit addressing is a bitch and workarounds are slow)
Nobody was sampling because 64 bits literally doesn't matter in the mobile space until you start needing more than 4GB of RAM [wikipedia.org]. I'm sure Apple still appreciates all your support though.
Confuzzling! (Score:2)
So, the cheapest TV stick imaginable has a Cortex A9 processor [amazon.com], so reading about the A9 processor in development by Apple is something that doesn't inspire much in the way of excitement up front for me. But it looks like Apple's A5 is more / less the Cortex A9 with some tweaks [wikipedia.org], so now we literally have two similar products with the same name that are generations apart.
I know of their technical strength in the low-power scene, and the MIPS/Watt race, ARM still leads by a mile, but ARM could also really stand
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The good news is that Apple isn't selling their A-series chip to anybody else, and the only people that will even know there is an "A9" branding issue will be the 0.1% of the market that actually pays any attention to what the SoC in their phone is named.
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Apple chips look good on paper, but when built into actual products the performance isn't anything special. Synthetic benchmarks are okay but real world performance tends to be fairly average, being beaten out by devices costing less than half or one third as much like the Nexus 5 or OnePlus One.
Take a look at some comparison videos on YouTube. Apps load about the same or a little slower, in-app performance is about the same.
Memory performance may be great, but there's only 1GB of it. It really shows when m
Reminds me of my brother/sister in law (Score:3)
They have been going to get divorced and accusing each other of all kind of horrible things for the last decade, yet they are constantly on some romantic trip together. Can't these two decide if they love or hate each other already?
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All's fair in love and business.
Is 'Made in America' going to be a premium? (Score:2)
It might sell in the USofA but the rest of the world should become very suspicious when something this complex has been made in the land of the three letter agencies and National Security Letters...