Comment by Oculus
13 years ago
How isn't Apple afraid that Samsung could steal their chip designs? Do they pick Samsung because they simply have no other option?
13 years ago
How isn't Apple afraid that Samsung could steal their chip designs? Do they pick Samsung because they simply have no other option?
Because there are IP laws that companies won't blatantly violate. External appearance notwithstanding.
The same reason Netflix uses Amazon's AWS services extensively, even though they are competitors. It is cheaper and easier to use Samsung.
Chips are just rectangles, and they're not even rounded. Therefore Apple has no valid claim on any chip design. /s
Chips are just rectangles, and softwares are just bits.
At a guess, I imagine it's really difficult to rip off a chip design just by looking at raw circuit designs (unless you're copying the entire chip). Wouldn't it take a great amount of expertise to look at some plans for a chip and say "oh, that's why it works so well!"?
It works so well mostly because it works only with other Apple hardware and software. They have up to 10 designs to optimize. That are fairly close to each other.
I think the threat of Apple taking their business elsewhere is larger then any gain from "stealing" the chip design.
The rift is a fabrication.
Most prior Apple designs have been close to stock ARM core implementations coupled with a PowerVR GPU. There hasn't been much if anything to steal, given that Samsung also licenses PowerVR GPUs and is also an ARM licensee.
The A7 is interesting in that it's the first mainstream 64-bit part, but I see Samsung being far more interested in the A53/A57 (designs that Samsung gets straight from ARM) than the A7. The A7, if rumors are true, is a sort of hybrid approach to use one of the next generation, 64-bit ARM cores early, similar to what Qualcomm does.
EDIT: ARM nomenclature is such a mess. The A7 runs ARMv7 or ARMv8 using a sort-of A57 dual-core architecture, but should not be confused with the ARMv7 Cortex-A7.
The A7 is not a hybrid approach. A7 is an ARMv8 chip (it implements the ARMv8 ISA), but not an ARM design (that's the difference between the processor license (can use ARM-designed cores) and the architecture license (can design own core implementing ARM ISA). Apple and Qualcomm have both licenses. There's nothing "hybrid" about using your architecture license.
ARMv8 provides two architectures: AArch64 and AArch32. Implementors can implement either or both. AArch64 is the brand new architecture while AArch32 is backwards-compatible with ARMv7-A. If both are implemented, it's possible to switch between AArch32 and AArch64 on the fly at specific change points, giving the ability to run AArch32 (= ARMv7) applications seamlessly on an AArch64 kernel (or an AArch32 guest os in an AArch64 hypervisor).
The A7 implements both, so do the A53 and A57.
The A7 is not a hybrid approach.
Unless you work at Apple in silicon design, you don't know that, and to be fair neither do I. But history has shown that every A# release gets greeted with incredible fanfare about the completely-custom CPU work at Apple, to later quietly get corrected when it turns out that it is at most a marginally derived ARM core.
I'm just going with history. Given that the A57 finished design last year, and started taping out early this year, it seems unlikely -- if not strategically risky -- that Apple just went their own way. From a pure performance perspective, ARM is hyping a clock-for-clock tripling of performance with the A57 over a Cortex-A15, or a quintupling of performance at a given power usage level.
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Or indeed the ARM7, which is ARMv4.
Up until the A5 the chips were designed and built by Samsung (from relatively standard ARM references). Apple hasn't done anything particularly exciting since.
The A7 seems pretty exciting to people who pay attention to these things: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7335/the-iphone-5s-review
It uses ARM v8 and Samsung's 28nm process and Imagination's series 6 GPU, which is all very exciting for chip nerds, but not for Samsung, who provides one, is a leading licencee of another and could buy the third if it wants to, so what's left to steal?
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They are afraid of this, and are moving away from Samsung as fast as they can, but indeed for now, Samsung is the only option.