News & Analysis
Updated: Samsung fabs Apple A5 processor
Rick Merritt
3/12/2011 5:53 PM EST
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mark.lapedus
3/13/2011 1:05 AM EST
Samsung made the first A5 chips. Then, however, TSMC will reportedly ramp the A5 in Q3 or Q4, according to sources. TSMC could be a second source to Samsung for the 45- and 40-nm version. Then, TSMC will fab the 28-nm version, sources said.
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melgross
3/13/2011 11:33 AM EDT
There are no sources, just one analyst making a guess.
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rick.merritt
3/13/2011 1:16 AM EST
Guess we'll have to wait for the teardown of the iPad 3 to find out if that comes to pass ;-)
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mark.lapedus
3/13/2011 3:18 AM EDT
I don't have to wait. The cat (TSMC) is out of the (Apple) bag.
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rfab
3/13/2011 9:53 AM EDT
Starting from 2007, the Taiwanese rumor many times, what is OEM XBOX CPU, OEM ATOM, OEM INTEL chipset, OEM A5, a result of a bankruptcy can be seen from here in the downhill TSMC
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rfab
3/13/2011 9:56 AM EDT
Is entirely speculation, APPLE's Samsung SOC design, foundry TSMC has not showed
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GREAT-Terry
3/13/2011 11:11 AM EDT
Does anybody know why Samsung can still win the right to manufacture the A5 this time? Is it because of a better fab process or something else that Taiwanese can't really compete with?
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cheonoh.lee
3/14/2011 5:33 AM EDT
Samsung Fab has great merit like free IP use fee, ultimate design support and 24 hours support.
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resistion
3/14/2011 5:11 AM EDT
Samsung must have given Apple some special break. Could every Galaxy tablet sold have a kickback?
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resistion
3/14/2011 5:25 AM EDT
On the other hand, TSMC and GlobalFoundries both make Snapdragon for Qualcomm, which is used to power the HTC phones competing with Iphone. So I don't see why ultimately Apple won't use both Samsung and TSMC. Ultimately it can impose capacity burden on competing products at least indirectly.
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resistion
3/14/2011 6:06 AM EDT
http://forums.vr-zone.com/news-around-the-web/165480-most-chips-inside-iphone-made-tsmc.html
It seems Apple already gives TSMC a lot of business, even if it's not the core processor or leading edge. Also TSMC does not manufacture its own tablet competitor, of course it's harder to leverage.
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selinz
3/14/2011 9:33 PM EDT
Regardless of the fabricator, I'm impressed with the packaging.. That's an impressive stackup..
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eewiz
3/21/2011 12:30 AM EDT
Probably Samsung gave low rates to fab the A5 to keep an eye on Apple's progress with the CPU. I mean the A5, has beaten even the NVdia Tegra 2 in terms of graphics performance.
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DynamicLogic.US
3/21/2011 1:11 AM EDT
Apple designed my SigmaTel team's AV SOC out of iPod Shuffle Gen1 when Samsung offered a pairing discount for flash. It was hard to compete with that on price. The Asus fab produced over 100k PCBs with out part and embedded software though, before it was done.
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DynamicLogic.US
3/21/2011 1:15 AM EDT
Asus 100k PCBs per day is enough to earn some profit for a fabless semi firm. Now as the XILINX ZYNQ system architect in platform planning, this iPad2 teardown and A5 analysis listed is interesting in that ZYNQ has a dual ARM A9 + 128 bit NEON vector processing + Programmable Logic and a wealth of validated high performance soft IP cores to drop into the PL all of which is 28nm TSMC. XILINX will let the world know when that innovation platform is ready for your designs.
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