More Reports of TSMC Beginning Trial Production of A6 Chip for 2012 Launch

I'm glad I'm holding out for the iphone 6. iPhone 5 adopters are going to get burned!

Haha. Sucker. I'm holding out for the iPhone 7. Then you iPhone 6 early adopters will really be regretting it.

A bit off topic, but I just have to say, that is truly an awful logo. Every time there's an article about TSMC I cringe when I see it.

This should put an end to early iPad 3 rumors.

I'm glad I'm holding out for the iphone 6. iPhone 5 adopters are going to get burned!

That's why it's best to wait for the iPhone (X + 1), because the iPhone X adopters always get burned.

I've heard the iPhone (X + 1) comes out (current year + 1) from whenever one wants to think about buying the next iPhone. Happy waiting!

This should put an end to early iPad 3 rumors.

:mad:

Your avatar made me punch my screen...:(

Any info, on whether it will be a quad core or not?

Quad-core? :cool:

Could be more. If they used the Cortex A15 (Most likely) it could be up to 8 cores over 2 clusters. They could also break the 2 GHz mark with the iPad 3.

I doubt it. If it were an A15 design, it would likely be first on market, by several months.

It will be a 28nm die shrink of A5 that focuses on power savings to compensate for the LTE chip it is likely to include. Then A7 will be a cortex A15 design.

Just remember that TSMC will have less then 1% 28nm wafer revenue Q4 this year. If this SoC is a 28nm SoC, it won't be released until next year.


19 april semiaccurate.com reported that Apple had sent tape outs to TSMC. An A5s SoC.
27 juni Semiaccurate.com reported that test wafers had come back to Apple from TSMC

If productions trials have started, it is an A5s.
Probably a 40nm dual core 1.5ghz cortex9 with PowerVR6. Fits exactly in line with competitors.

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Please let it not be so! TSMC never gets their crap together in new node shrinks. Just look at the 40nm shrink. It took them 1.5 years to get it sorta right and at the same time harmed ATI GPU sales, due to low yields and constrained chip supplies.

What do you thunk would happen with Apple? Same thing, even worse constrained supplies.

Maybe.
But who should Apple use?

Global Foundries is at least 2 year late with 28nm.
Intel does not sell many wafers.
Samsung?

I'm glad I'm holding out for the iphone 6. iPhone 5 adopters are going to get burned!

Really? Really? I've sold the previous phone on eBay since the 3GS for equal to or more than the annual $199 fee AT&T always offers customers upgrading to the newest iphone. No one is getting burned.

But in the tablet race, the Tegra II is the only line of comparison because Honeycomb was built around it and Android is the only real competitor so far in this field. Comparable OMAPs (to even the A5) are still several months out. The Adreno 300 GPUs (Qualcomm) also look really good but may be a bit latter.

Not really. Qualcomm has silicon out there (TouchPad), Exynos is out there (Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1) as well as the OMAP 4430 (playbook, droid 3, upcoming bionic). Just because they don't same a comparable GPU doesn't mean they aren't comparable SoCs, especially in the areas of CPU performance. GPU performance is a subset of a SoC's function.

I don't think so. Apple recognizes the single biggest draw to iOS right now is gaming. The 543MP2 gave a HUGE boost in gaming performance. With Sony's NGP sporting a quad core A9 design with the 543MP4, Apple knows what it has to shoot for to compete on what it sees as its primary point of competition. Mobile gaming.

You think gaming is what is winning Apple the mobile war? That's an aspect of it, but far from the only, much less primary. The draw of it is the design, ecosystem, app selection etc.

While the iPhone competes with the DS, 3DS and PSP variants, they have overlapping market segments. Neither is a subset of the other. What they are doing is leeching casual gamers from those platforms and adding new players to the market. There will always be a contingent of hardcore gamers that demand physical buttons and other amenities that only a dedicated device will offer. Thus, while good graphics are essential for those platforms, they are only a nicety on the mobile phone platforms. Game selection will trump AAA titles (at least for now). For instance, what big graphical title can you name for iOS? Most people might manage Infinity Blade. But for most people it's cut the rope, angry birds, fruit ninja, etc. Small time wasters with undemanding graphics.

On top of that, the mobile phone platforms will necessary lag the gaming platforms because they'll have more levels of abstraction between them and the hardware. They'll have to have a lot more than a matching 543MP4+ core to match the Vita's performance.

Finally, people don't follow mobile phone platforms for "killer app" games like they do dedicated consoles. For instance, Mario is a huge draw for Nintendo systems, whereas Uncharted will move some Vitas (me included here). No one buys a mobile phone thinking "Oooh, this game is coming out so I'll buy that." A phone means much more to a person and those users also have a reasonable expectation of every game they could want being available on their platform. That certainly makes the most sense for app developers, so until mobile phone developers see enough of a market to justify acquiring exclusives on mobile phone games, games will be a feature and not a purchase decider.

Apple increased it because the 535 was pushed really hard on the iPhone 4 and the iPad as it was. I am amazed at how much faster many graphics operations (like fills and blits) are on the iPhone 3G S when compared to the iPhone 4. The 543MP2 was a requirement to maintain the mobile gaming edge. If Apple does jump to a Retina display, they will need to offset all those darn pixels with something. Heading to a 28nm will really help the power thing so they may be able to increase performance while maintaining the same power envelope.

It's not clear that Apple has prioritized the gaming edge. They certainly want to stay on top in terms of the ARM core they use, but we don't even know for sure they want to go retina on the iPad, so their intent there remains to be seen.

544 adds full Direct X compliance but no updates to OpenGL.

That's what I recall reading, but the wikipedia page showed identical DirectX 9c compliance and I couldn't be bothered to look further into it.

Apple likes to have multiple suppliers for their components. That way there is no single point of failure, and Apple can start bidding wars between suppliers. As in "Brand X can make these parts for 52.3 cents each in lots of 1 million. If you can't match that, we'll take our business elsewhere..." So the TSMC deal makes perfect sense.

There is, of course, the small matter of legal action against Samsung. Which may or may not affect Apple and Samsung's business relationship.

So what about Intel? Apple supposedly served notice to Intel, warning them that if they didn't reduce the power consumption of their mobile x86 SoCs that they'd go elsewhere. Intel's response was to spew $300 million into the Wintel community in an attempt to bribe them into copying the MacBook Air. Irrational, short-sighted, and reeking of desperation. Much better to spend the $300 actually improving their own product and/or process.

Then what will Apple do if Intel ignores their demands? Who could they go to? Well, there's always AMD. They are the second largest maker of x86-compatible chips and they bought ATI in 2006. And guess what. Their market cap is only $4.6 billion. Apple could either acquire a majority of their stock or buy them outright. Then Apple could use their engineering talent to massage the AMD chips for lower power consumption.

Apple acquiring AMD is a long shot. Especially considering that it is also possible that Apple could be planning to migrate some or all of their Mac lines to ARM-based chips. That would take years, considering how long it took for Adobe to migrate their professional suites from OS 9 to OS X and Cocoa. But I'm sure Apple could sell millions of MacBook Airs even if they don't run Adobe bloatware.