Apple Gets Its First Batch of iPhone Chips From TSMC

redletterdave (2493036) notes that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) has shipped its first batch of microprocessors to Apple as the iPhone maker looks to diversify its overseas suppliers. Apple will continue to rely on Samsung for its microprocessors, but as the rivalry between Apple and Samsung heats up in the mobile and soon wearable arenas, the deal with TSMC allows Apple to be less reliant on Samsung and therefore have more leverage with respect to price negotiations for future chips, as TSMC has supplanted Samsung Electronics as Apple's chief chipmaker for iPhones and iPads. Since 2011, Apple has been striking deals with other display and chip makers around Asia to reduce its dependence on Samsung. As a result of this slowdown in sales, Samsung on Monday announced operating income for its fiscal second quarter had sunk to a two-year low, blaming 'weak' sales of low- and medium-end smartphones, strong competition and subpar demand.
It may not be a household name like Intel or AMD, but TSMC is the world's biggest chip maker by revenue.

Re:

[cheesybagel]

Yes especially in the last couple of years. This negatively impacted NVIDIA and AMD's GPU business more than once. They also had packaging issues a couple of years back. Remember the NVIDIA GPU recall?

TSMC is the world's largest foundry business. They do not design chips. They manufacture chips. Their competitors are companies like GlobalFoundries. AMD does not have factories anymore, everything is manufactured at TSMC or GlobalFoundries, and until a couple of years ago Intel did not allow 3rd parties to us

Re:

[ArcadeMan]

I would love to see Atmel go with Intel, just to see what could come out of it.

I'd like to see the ATtiny and ATmega series running above 20MHz. Sure there's other Atmel uC that can do that, but in non-DIP packages and at a much higher price.

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[John Jamieson]

I don't remember TSMC even keeping up with AMD most of the time, and they were a node behind Intel at almost any time.

It appeared to me that TSMC may have seemed to keep up, but AMD and Intel were producing huge dies and had to have a process really fixed before they ramped. TSMC had the luxury of announcing they were at a node, while only producing simple stuff with it and fixing the bugs over a long period of time.

An Aside: In my opinion Intel chip designs have been less than spectacular given the R

Re:

[cheesybagel]

Yes usually Intel has the process lead followed by the group of IBM, GlobalFoundries (which owns the fabs that used to belong to AMD), Samsung. TSMC comes way after that. The main advantage of TSMC has been that it is a lot more responsive to customer requests and they have a lot of capacity. Plus they do not compete with any company in chip design since they are a pure play foundry.

An Aside: In my opinion Intel chip designs have been less than spectacular given the R&D resources they have, it has been

Samsung's slowing sales...

[TWX]

I suspect that a good part of Samsung's slowing sales is consumers that are tired of spending more money all of the time to do the same thing. I've got a Galaxy SII. It does everything that I need it to do. It's paid for. I don't foresee any needs that a newer phone would fulfill, so short of a broken phone or a paradigm shift I don't see a need to shell out several hundred dollars to have essentially the same functionality.

Geek-chic likes to talk about and to chase the latest gadgets, but the hype really isn't as widespread as reports would indicate, and even those that have chased the newest have often gotten tired of doing it without any real, tangible improvements.

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[Tough Love]

Geek-chic likes to talk...

chique.

Re:

[Shatrat]

Schickimicki

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[93 Escort Wagon]

Schick Shadel

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[CastrTroy]

It's amazing how fast phones reached this level of performance. The iPhone was only released 7 years ago, and the first BlackBerry, which many would consider the one of the first smart phones, 15 years ago. In that short amount of time, we have gone from always wanting the newest thing, to models which are 2 years old being sufficiently fast enough, and people are starting to see little reason for upgrades. The PC market hit a similar point a few years back. And since then, you have 2 basic types of PC o

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[TWX]

Smartphones well predate the Apple and Blackberry options. Palm and Qualcomm developed the pdQ-series in the nineties and they were on sale by 1999 and were direct variants on the Palm Pilot series of personal organizers, which themselves date back to the early nineties, and had many of the components that a phone-based device would want like an address book, a calendar, a tasks list, a calculator, etc.

And that's not even going into the other companies that built personal organizers around this same tim

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[mveloso]

old smartphones are to today's smartphones as:

A BMW 7 series is to a model-T ford
GPS is to maps
Color TV vs Stereoscopes

I'd put my iPhone 1 up against a psion any day of the week.

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[TWX]

I wasn't saying that old smartphones were in any way comparable to modern ones. My point was that smartphone development has been occurring far longer than most people realize, and is in-parallel with PCs in that the performance characteristics of the device have outpaced the capabilities of the software and user experience to the point that there's not a whole lot of benefit in upgrading without an external reason to do so.

And as to your analogy of GPS vs maps, I can use a map without any electrical po

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[TWX]

I do actually! It cost less than two smartphones!

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[johnsie]

Maps don't show road quality.

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[TWX]

You're incorrect. The maps that I just picked up indicated limited-access freeways, divided highways, two-lane highways, lesser paved roads, unpaved roads, and forest service trails. Different lines for each type.

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[BasilBrush]

The first smartphone was the Nokia Communicator. 1996.

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[gaiageek]

"... blaming 'weak' sales of low- and medium-end smartphones."

I'd suggest that their weak sales has something to do with the fact that their phones are ridiculously overpriced. Samsung seems to think that they're the 'Apple' of Android phones and that they can price their offerings accordingly. Look at their Galaxy S4 Mini and just announced S5 Mini models: mid-range devices (both have only 1.5GB RAM) with flagship prices.

Then there's Samsung's "budget" phones. They also just announced the Galaxy Ac [gsmarena.com]

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[tlhIngan]

Well, the real reason is when you're on top, there's only one place to go and that's downhill.

Samsung's dominance in the Android market is legendary - it's what, 90% of all Android phones? (take Google I/O's 1B unique devices in the past month, that would be 900M of them Samsung. And given sales figures, ~20-30M (2-4%) are SGS5's, 80M or so are SGS4 (9%). All the rest are thousands of lower end models (SGS3, 2, and all the Galaxy S variants that are really just cheap phones with fancy branding).

Like how App

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[alvinrod]

Samsung's dominance in the Android market is legendary - it's what, 90% of all Android phones?

It's not that high. A C|net article [cnet.com] from a few months ago puts them at slightly more than 30% of the global share, which is still pretty damned impressive. What's been impressive is that Samsung has been one of the only companies actually making money. HTC just posted that they were back in the black for the first time in a while and neither LG, Sony, or any of the other big players have done much better than break even. Motorola bled like stuck pig both before and after Google acquired them. Blackberry and

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[trawg]

I would say you are 100% correct - in the Android ecosystem. I am exactly the same; I have a relatively new Nexus 4 and before that I had a Nexus One that I used until it was basically a painful experience because it just kept running out of space.

The N5 is basically the same phone and there's not a lot the Samsungs offer that interest me.

But Apple has a different model - they don't have thousands of different options. It's just one new model every couple years. They have a prestige associated with the iPho

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[rsborg]

I suspect that a good part of Samsung's slowing sales is consumers that are tired of spending more money all of the time to do the same thing. I've got a Galaxy SII. It does everything that I need it to do. It's paid for. I don't foresee any needs that a newer phone would fulfill, so short of a broken phone or a paradigm shift I don't see a need to shell out several hundred dollars to have essentially the same functionality.

THere's a lot that an S4 or S5 will do that your S2 cannot - though you may not appreciate it, including things like Bluetooth4 or a larger battery, better camera or support for more innovative features on the latest Android (or TouchWiz) release.

Personally I have an iPhone and I upgrade every several years with my wife leapfrogging so one of us has the latest phone. Apple has perfected the upgrade treadmill - you're compelled but not forced into upgrading, and they make the features on each new generation

fortune 1 company diversifies supply

[alen]

News at 11

Almost every company half of apple's size has multiple vendors for every part of their product

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[coinreturn]

News at 11

Almost every company half of apple's size has multiple vendors for every part of their product

Not when it comes to semiconductors; especially custom ones. Also, one newsworthy spin is that Apple is diversifying away from a competitor.

TSMC not the largest

[John Jamieson]

TSMC is the largest pure play foundry, not the largest chip manufacturer.

Honestly

[Kuberz]

I busted my smartphone screen about a year ago (The Motorola Droid Razr XT912). I ordered a new screen, and while I waited for my new screen replacement I reactivated my old Blackberry Bold World Tour (I think it was the 8950? Could be wrong).

I actually enjoyed going back to my blackberry for a few weeks, it has a lot of glitches, and it only has 3g support, so it caused a few headaches. But I use my phone as a phone, so the fact that it could call, text, and do my e-mail was plenty for me. I don't ever

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[johnsie]

Cool story, bro. I stopped reading as soon as you mentioned 3g. This is 2014 and not every consumer has the same requirements or wishes as you.

They will suck but so what

[gelfling]

We live in a new era where quality is shit and no one cares. Fuck it.

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[johnsie]

Go back to playing snake on your black and white nokia then.