Apple may partner with TSMC for A5 chip production, ditch Samsung

By on Mar 9, 2011 at 9:59 AM
Tablets March 9, 2011

According to a report filed by EETimes, Apple may partner with the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in a “foundry relationship” to produce the A5 processor for the iPad 2. The move is being billed as a setback to Samsung Electronics, the company currently responsible for the production of Apple’s A4 silicon. ”Apple, according to the source, will use TSMC for three reasons: 1. Samsung competes with the iPhone and iPad; 2. TSMC has the highest yielding 40-nm process in the foundry world; and 3. TSMC has the most 40-nm capacity,” writes the Times. The site quotes a report from FBR Capital, which expects iPad production to top 45 million units in 2011; 13 million units in the first half of the year and 32 million units in the second. Neither Apple, Samsung, nor TSMC have publicly commented on the purported foundry deal.

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18 Comments

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  • Anonymous

    Wonder how long will Apple just makes the damn things themselves. Could you imagine a city sized Apple factory in China? It’s be like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

    • Anonymous

      Yes, but with less chocolate and more suicide.

    • Anonymous

      Although — coming up with your own fabs is a few billion dollar investment and a few years of tooling it up.

      No way Apple will do it that quickly nor cheaply for such a low run. Everybody farms it out, even Intel, AMD, etc to either Taiwan, or Germany. Samsung is pretty lucky to have built up their own, but it’s probably based on years of making memory and flash first.

  • whaaaa

    Old Stevo must be upset with Samsung putting out better products than Apple. . . That’s it Steve, take your toys and run off like the spoiled infantile brat you are.

    • Anonymous

      I would never buy anything made by Samsung. They have the worst product support in the entire tech industry. I had so many problems with a HDTV I bought from them and they do not stand behind their products. Fixed three times in 6 months, first time it took 2 months to get it fixed. After 9 months it was in the trash. I will never buy anything from them again as long as I live.

      • KCRic

        Maybe if you stop humping the screen it will last longer. My 50″ 1080p plasma from samsung has had no issues. Then again, I always buy this thing called a ‘warranty’ so no questions asked, they fix it or I get a new one. Besides flash memory, the one thing samsung does right is display technology and they are extremely good at it. Their phones are another story though…

    • Anonymous

      Name one Sammy product that’s better than an Apple product. Just one.

      • Anonymous

        flash, ram, HDTVs, hard-drives, SSD drives … oh you mean apples to apples where Apple actually made something equivalent.

      • KCRic

        No, he means something that apple actually made, not the stuff everyone makes for them. Oh sh!t, I let the secret out.

        Apple has never ‘made’ a product. They just piece it together, hell, even their OS is made from borrowed code, including the kernel. Most things that make apple great are due to samsung Louis.

      • Joshuajones95

        That’s way more than one:O

  • Apple Fanboy

    if apple doesznt do bizness wit u ur losin out lol

  • KCRic

    You can’t see it but I’m laughing. Apple still uses 40-45nm processors? No wonder they torch cars, fry USB ports, and burn peoples hands because the battery pops. Those big processors get hot, especially at 1GHz without active cooling. Try going the route of other manufacturers and use the 32nm or smaller processors, especially if Apple wants mentionable hardware specs for a change and decides to go dual core.

    • Anonymous

      Um, the A5 chip is dual core, n’est-ce pas?

      • KCRic

        Do some reading then you’ll understand why the fact that it’s dual core really isn’t a factor. It’s still bulky for a modern processor. When others are kicking out dual, triple, and quad cores using significantly smaller processes. Do you know how small a nanometer is? 1/1,000,000,000 (billion) of a meter, it’s not the size of the processor, it’s the size of everything that makes it up basically. That’s why “dual core” or not, it’s a huge processor, stone age in tech time.

      • Anonymous

        40nm or even the previous 65nm is perfectly fine in the mobile space where heatsink-requiring performance isn’t needed, and the highest watt dispersion is still around 2-5, iirc.

        Dual-core is nice, but only because programming has been getting sloppy lately. It doesn’t have huge cache nor deep-pipelines, nor needless cores, so the processor size is again reasonable.

    • JW

      Spot on. Now I know that Intel leads in manufacturing / process nodes, but they have been producing chips at 32nm for over a year, and will begin 22nm production this fall. This Apple issue might be related to the rumors that TSMC was/is having some issues with yields at 28nm.

      Guess this means iPad 3 will roll with 28nm A5 (or A6 maybe?)

  • Commenter

    I am not sure about the Rumor.
    Global Foundries (which was spin-off from AMD’s manufacturing) might seem a far better fit for Apple.
    a) SMSNG, GF, IBM Micro are all partners in manufacturing in both SOI and non-SOI spheres. They share IP, Libraries and approach to a great degree.
    b) ARM already has a relationship with Global Foundries.

  • Joshuajones95

    An apple a day keeps the isheeps away

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