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AppleA9

A new teardown of the Apple A9 SoC from Chipworks has revealed that both Samsung and TSMC are fabbing Apple's latest processor — and information technology's the Samsung blueprint that has the edge in overall surface expanse. In 2014, when TSMC finally wrested Apple's cut-edge 20nm design abroad from Samsung, rumors soon surfaced that Apple would caput dorsum to its longtime foundry frenemy to create 14nm designs. Then, months later, nosotros heard rumors that Apple was moving some parts dorsum to TSMC, due to yield problems with Samsung's 14nm.

There are some facets of the current state of affairs that are yet unclear, since neither company is falling over itself to disclose such confidential data. But the fact that Apple is tapping both foundries, even after Samsung signed upwardly GlobalFoundries as a second source, speaks to significant yield problems across the lath. That'southward puzzling, in and of itself, because Samsung'southward 14nm chips for its Galaxy devices haven't seemed to suffer whatever yield problem. Whether this speaks to difficulty with certain aspects of the A9 SoC design or to Samsung's conclusion to prioritize its ain 14nm capacity for itself is still unknown.

Bringing up the same blueprint at 2 unlike foundries and moving both of them into book production, however, is quite expensive — Apple tree tin can easily afford to pay for it, but the company would've only taken this step if it felt it had no selection but to do so.

Apple-v-Samsung

The size deviation — Samsung'due south version of the fleck is about 8% smaller than TSMC's — comes courtesy of superior scaling. It's common for the foundry industry to talk near specific nodes every bit if each implementation of that node is identical to every other. When Intel, TSMC, and Samsung all merits to be building 14nm processors, information technology'south unsaid that all 3 companies are on equal basis. This is frequently non the instance, as the chart below makes articulate.

FeatureSizes1

Intel's 14nm is essentially smaller than what TSMC or Samsung phone call 14nm, sometimes by significant margins. With that said, the 8% gap between TSMC and Samsung's dice isn't simply explained by any single metric — feature sizes on a die depend on what kind of feature you're building, and SoCs contain many different types of logic, from memory caches to CPU cores. The gap between the two companies implies that Apple's A9 is congenital on TSMC's first-generation 16nm technology; the second generation (16FF+) was designed to close ability and performance gaps between TSMC and its Korean competitor.

Chipworks's general teardown suggests that the new SoC packs an 8MB L3 enshroud serving the same dual-cadre configuration that the company has preferred for years. There's too an estimated 3MB of shared L2 cache and perchance a six-core GPU. The new SoC uses LPDDR4, steps up to 2GB of RAM (as rumored) and, according to early on performance previews, offers blazing-fast performance compared with any other hardware on the market.