Roger Fingas
Samsung has reportedly secured a deal to resume making A-series processors for Apple in 2018, having been largely cut out of production for the past few years.
The company recently bought ultraviolet lithography machines to make 7 nanometer iPhone processors, The Korea Herald said on Tuesday. Sources claimed that one of Samsung's three co-CEOs, Kwon Oh-hyun, was central to winning the deal, and visited Apple's headquarters in June.
"The CEO could persuade Apple's top brass taking advantage of their close ties on OLED," one source said. Samsung is thought to be the lone OLED supplier for this year's "iPhone 8", since it controls 95 percent of the world's OLED market — companies like LG and Foxconn's Sharp are only now beginning to ramp up their production capacity.
Samsung won't replace Apple's current processor maker of choice, TSMC, the Herald said, citing various other reports. Instead, the two companies are expected to share orders as with the iPhone 6s.
In the meantime Samsung is said to be nearing completion of testing its new equipment, after which it will look to get final approval from Apple.
TSMC has largely monopolized A-series production since 2014, likely because of Apple's interest in distancing itself from its main competitor in smartphones and tablets. It otherwise tends to have multiple suppliers for any major component, however, since that forces price competition, reduces bottlenecks, and helps meet the quantities needed for global launches.
This year's iPhones — including the "8", "7s," and "7s Plus" — are allegedly encountering production delays, though not because of processor issues.
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24 Comments
Hopefully this means Glofos fabs aren't less efficient anymore, as they share fab nodes with Samsung. That's been hurting AMD with the wafer agreement (so much that they partly paid their way out of it, after paying their way into it)
It would be interesting if Samsung was broken up into separate corporations. Then we could continue to get mad at Samsung Mobile for stealing Apple designs while giving Samsung Computing (or whichever division handles processor and memory fabrication) a free pass. I understand everything is still controlled by people who regularly get in trouble but I want to try and think of the majority of the company, especially its workers, as good people. I won't buy Samsung TVs or kitchen appliances but I'd like to think that using Samsung processor fabrication could still be a good thing for Apple.
Ok, maybe not and maybe Samsung will always be the enemy.
Shouldn't that be:
"Samsung gets the privilege of fabbing the worlds most advanced ARM mobile processor."
For decades, new processes for fabricating microprocessors have led to lower cost per transistor, lower power utilization, and better performance.
We may now be entering a new phase in which new processes lead to lower power utilization and better performance, but without any cost savings (and possibly cost increases). That's why Apple stands out as a driving customer for these new processes -- because they are focused more on performance and power than they are on cost.
It could be a very long time before we see companies like AMD and Nvidia utilizing an EUV process.