Samsung to quadruple mobile chip production for Apple in 2011 - Page 2

Reaching back to the distant past of Apple naming conventions: A4 Plus, A4 Classic, A4 GS--oh what the hell, A4 Turbo and A4 SuperSport!

Oh, I understand what you're saying there, I'm simply wondering which way they'll go with it. A4 sounds good. I'm just curious if they'll simply call the chip the A4 regardless of the changes made to it, sort of like they call a Mac Pro a Mac Pro regardless of internal revisions.

I think you are discounting an important aspect of the A4 - what's more important is all the stuff the A4 doesn't have. By jettisoning the stuff Apple doesn't use vs general purpose everything- and-the-kitchen-sink designs like hummingbird Apple gets smaller and more power effecient chips.

Also as Sol' pointed out, the iOS devices are more than just their hardware specs. Apples tight integration with their software allows them to get better performance.

So while other phones may have higher CPU speeds, and from a geek perpective higher is better, in portable electronics higher speed means higher power consumption and more heat - not desirable characteristics for battery life.

This is why I don't see Apple talking specifics about the hardware - first, it really is irrelevant - the device either delivers a good user experience or it doesn't. More importantly, the vast majority of people are wholly unqualified to interpret the mix of hardware and software and state with any reasonableness what raw specs like CPU speed mean.

Also if you remember back to early articles about the A4, in addition to leaving all but the essential stuff out it has extra power management. Apples combination if battery life, small size/weight and aggressive price points aren't an accident.

In mobile devices where every decision has a much more cascading effect on overall performance, the total control Apple has over all of their components allows them to have a significant edge over their competitors. It's pretty obvious now, but with the next generation of hardware I expect this gap to widen even more.

This isn't a desktop world where to match or exceede Apple performance you can just crank the clock speed or throw in the latest cutting edge chip that is unoptimized in hardware and software - every decision has a significant impact if the holy trinity of mobile: size/weight, battery and cost.

By the time the iPad 3 and iPhone 6 hit, if there isn't at least one other company tightly integrating hardware AND software like Apple, no one will be able to catch them.

The only one I can see is HP with WebOS. HP has also ran custom chip architectures in the past - whether they still have that expertise or not I'm not sure.


MS could do it if they wanted. Will wait until it's too late like the Zune or will they just "Zune" their WP7 partners now and get it over with? I'm banking on timidity until it's too late - unfortunately

The reverse is true as well... You can add hardware that can help out software as well. So, optimization goes both ways. Just as with hardware H.264 decoders, there is a lot that can be done in hardware to make a system run more efficient.

OS X is full of technologies that can benefit from hardware optimizations. The more processing you can offload to co-processors, the more performance you can squeeze out of the same main CPU. This is why it is extremely important for Apple to design its own SoCs, they can continue to design systems with specialized processors that can take over from CPU duties.

This is also why Apple has done a lot of work in getting OpenCL standardized and put a lot of work into technologies like LLVM, 'C' Blocks and have helped developers adopt threading and parallelism in their applications by removing a lot of the complexity of scheduling via GCD.

Yes, it would be great to see Apple "keep up" with competitors and release a Cortex-A9 based SoC, but the reality is, they don't need it to keep up performance wise. There are many other ways to tackle performance issues. Heading down the same path Intel took a decade ago is not the best path to follow. With desktops it was okay because there was an endless supply of power. Mobile processors have to keep pace with battery technology and right now, they're out pacing batteries. ARM is great at designing highly efficient general purpose processors, but still can't compete with highly optimized, special purpose processors.

Right now, of all the mobile operating systems, Apple is in the best position as far allowing them to squeeze performance out of hardware and allowing them to offload more and more processing to coprocessors.

Sorry, but Apple's volume doesn't come close to justifying getting into the IC business. They could dump $10 billion into it tomorrow and never get a return on that investment. Worse, they would not be big enough to keep up with the process innovations to remain competitive - so they'd always be generations behind everyone else.

Smart businesses know their core strengths and how to build on them. IC manufacture is clearly not a core strength for Apple, so it would be incredibly foolish for Apple to start doing it. Others can do it far better, faster, and less expensively than Apple can.

As for Samsung competing with Apple? Completely irrelevant. First, this is common practice in this industry. People buy from competitors all the time. Second, Apple is important enough that Samsung isn't going to screw them. Third, I'm sure Apple has alternate vendors lined up. Finally, they'll know instantly if Samsung messes up. The risk is miniscule.

So you think Apple would make custom hardware for their own devices and not take advantage of that customization in their system software?

Okay, but Apple system software does not ignore built-in hardware. The hardware and software are made/optimized for each other.
Processor speed is only one part of the system. It's not simply, " the fastest processor wins".

Thanks for clearing that up. You're probably right. But it's interesting that you could substitute smart phone for IC in your second paragraph and get what conventional wisdom was three or four years ago.

Funny how that 'theory' doesn't pan out in the real world. The Samsung S8500 Wave, which has a Hummingbird processor, gets better battery life results in GSM-Arena tests than the iPhone 4.


Without a performance metric that can actually be tested in the real world, such genaralised waffle is meaningless. It's reminiscent of the days when Apple and their fans used to declare Macs running on Power PC chips outperformed PC's running on Intel chips and that clock speeds and benchmarks were meaningless. Those claims were lies, as history has proven. The Power PC couldn't deliver and when Apple switched to Inel chips, the performance of Macs rocketed. I remember clearly the hardware/software synergy Apple could deliver, being touted as a superiority - decades ago. It just wasn't, apart from a marketing tool and as a salve for the egos of Mac users, myself being one of them.

Apple's raison d'être is profit, not performance.

Apple do better software and they are absolute masters at leveraging that advantage to reduce HW costs and maximise profit margins. A classic example of that would be the iPad. The biggest differnce between the A4 SoC in the iPad and the Hummingbird was the deletion of 250 Mb of Ram Apple didn't tell Samsung to leave out the RAM to boost performance and 'user experience' they did it for their best performing product, the Mac Scrooge.


Pure bull dust - sorry. The Orion SoC (Hummingbird successor) will blow away anything Samsung or Apple currently make, performance wise. The peak power consumption will be higher, but due to multiple efficiency improvements, the average power consumption will actually be lower - reportedly 30% lower!:


http://www.phonearena.com/news/Samsu...hipset_id13089




And such generalised statements aren't proven either.


That's bordering on delusional.

'Total control over their components' applies more to Samsung than it does Apple due to them being an actual HW manufacturer of vast scale and comprehensive vertical integration.


Samsung are in a better position to do HW/Software synergy and integration than Apple. The S8500 Wave already has Samsung's own Bada operating system on it. It is quite possible that there isn't a single component in the Wave that isn't made by Samsung themselves. Despite Sol's piss poor joke, Bada is actually a very impressive OS. It is Unix based like iOS and C++ apps written for it execute way faster than the equivalents on Android, I understand.

.

Doesn't this GSMArena post say the iPhone 4 wins?

http://blog.gsmarena.com/iphone-4-ba...layback-champ/

You are saying that the Samsung Wave S5800 that can get 7 hours of ‘3G’ talk time, just like the iPhone 4 has better battery life? Note to the readers at home: the Samsung Wave has a LARGER battery, a SMALLER display (read: smaller area to light, thus using less power), LESS resolution and HALF the RAM, yet only gets the same ‘3G’ talk time.

The only relevant test that is does seem to best the iPhone is standby time. We also have to consider that Apple and Sony use the most accurate battery life testing in CE and others try to slide on by with the bare minimum which is probably why they don’t list video playback, audio playback, or internet usage of the device. This is something Apple prominently displays.


You mean “generalized” like the above quote text? You can deny the benefits of efficient code and tailored chips, but any reasonable person with a modicum of technical understanding will knowing you are full of it.

The iPhone 4 scored 9 hours and 40 minutes of video.
The Samsung Wave scored 8 hours and 40 minutes in the same challenge.

Remember, the Samsung Wave has a LARGER battery, SMALLER display, and LESS pixels than the iPhone.

In video playback, yes, but in the general usage test, no.

The reviews of the two devices state the iPhone 4 managed almost 3 days while the Wave managed 3 and a half. I think the iPhone 4 test was even slightly biased in that it didn't include navigation, as the Wave test did, but I'm not going to quibble about 10min

GPS receivers are easily the biggest battery killers in phones in my experience


http://blog.gsmarena.com/the-king-is...life-champion/


http://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_4-review-490p3.php

That's fewer pixels.

You are desperate aren't you. The battery in the Wave has 80 mAh more capacity, which is only 1.35% more I think. The Wave screen is a whopping 5mm smaller (-6%?).

I'll concede on the pixels but no matter how you try and spin it, the Hummingbird based wave is not a battery hog so all those arguments of Apples superior power management and better battery life just don't hold water - or enough water to be worth a damn in the real world. A lot of Apple's power optimisations seem to have gone into music playback, where the iP4 is amazing.

I do not appreciate being called a liar.

"Beyond that, there is the benefit of creating some jobs in the US but, as mentioned above, this would need to be weighed against the longer supply chain. Is it possible that this is a first step in returning some final assembly to the US? That seems very unlikely."

What if the devices were so easy to assemble that fewer, or no, dexterous hands were needed to it make, and Apple has some innovative patents pertaining to manufacturing. And that's not even factoring in the LiquidMetal license which I think changes everything.
I for one would love to have Apple, and many other companies, make stuff here again.

Hummingbird, Samsung Wave or Bada being power efficient does not mean that Apple's A4, iPhone 4 or iOS are not power efficient or that they aren't more power efficient in key areas.

PS: Many months after the iPhone 4 was released Jobs announced they would be tightening up their battery testing even more. Since they already have the most accurate measure in the industry why would they do this? I suspect they have made a significant leap in power efficiency in one or more areas that will included in upcoming products.

yellow hill. answer this.

Why would Bada execute any better than Objective C on it, as objective C is also compiled down to native ( unlike Android, in general). The HW and software integration depends more on the software team.

Samsung dont really have an OS team. Apple have chip designers, a compiler team, a kernel team, a lower level API team ( writing plenty of API in C, as well as Objective C), an energy management team and so on.

Samsung are throwing this stuff together. If you cant imagine Samsun writing an OS to compete with a MacBook , you cant imagine them writing one to compete with a tablet.

My guess is that Apple are less efficient in the stuff they are not historically good at doing - i.e. not OS type stuff. Movies and music you admit are amazing. Phone calls have always seemed to drain my battery.

They have surely improved on that front, but the iPhone was never poor at talk time when you look at other GSM and UMTS talk times and compare battery mAh and consider the other HW aspects.

A more recent change if the rumours are correct is Apple sending less notifications to the towers. I think this was first noted by 02 in the UK or T-Mobile in Germany, and was assisted by AT&T here in the US. There is always room to improve and they do seem uniquely positioned to make improvements across more areas than anyone else.

AnandTech does some pretty good tests. The ones from GSMArena are too inconsistent to be useful. There is a reason we isolate areas of usage in these tests. If they we the same tests and durations across all devices it would be at least be consistent, even though ultimately useless, but they dont even do that.

I am not 100% sure of the question you are asking. Are you referring to where I said:


?

If so, I based that on a comment I read by a Bada app developer who stated:




So who wrote Bada?



I have a Wave myself. For something with a non-existent OS - a result of not being developed by a non-existent OS team - and a bunch of parts just thrown together, it's pretty amazing. You are right, I can't see Samsung taking on OSX, but you are wrong about tablets. I can certainly see a Bada variant on a tablet, though I suspect Samsung will stick to Android for that application.

You are making a lot of sweeping assumptions.

Movies were originally 4x3. The reason they began producing wider aspect ratios is because of television. Movies needed to offer a bigger experience than television and the most effective way to do that is to make the aspect ratio wider to provide a more expansive experience.

For over 70 years television has been 4x3. The migration to 16x9 has only been in the last 10 years. The reason television is switching to 16x9 is to provide more of an experience like that of the movies.

As the screen gets smaller and you sit closer to it. The expansive field of the wide screen effect is less effective. All you really end up doing is having a smaller picture. That is the reason why HD television uses 1.77 (16x9) and not 1.85 or 2.4 that movies use.

This is a wrinkle in the GSM system itself and one of the problems with voice and data being available at the same time. Its not very energy efficient.

iOS is compiled down to native code. It can use C++, and people do. It can use C, and people do. It can use Objective C ( a form of C) and people do. You dont really know much. The iOS team also write their own compiler which is designed to increase the efficiency of the native code being compiled by the native API.


A team without the experience of writing an OS for more than 3 decades, whether in Next or Apple. They are not an OS team. If they were, where is the BADA desktop OS?[/quote]



I am sure it is "amazing" at the level of your technical knowledge - which is close to imaginary. However by an OS team I mean someone who can write an OS from the lower level mobiles, to something running an iMac 27 inch screen, or a xServer, or an Air. I dont think Android can scale either.

I worry more about what's happened with other industries going down the road of outsourced production. The companies that start out building fairly peripheral parts keep moving up the food chain until they're building the whole product, and then the next stage is they begin marketing their own variants, removing a final outside distributor from the cost chain, and eventually take over the market. Show me a TV still manufactured in the US.

Also, there may be IP and patent laws, but certainly Samsung's sophisticated enough - given that they know Apple's designs so intimately through their manufacture - to reverse engineer any Apple improvements into their own Android phone parts - and suggest to Google how to exploit them through leaner, less generic code if standards could be dictated by Big G.

I at least see some advantages for Samsung here that could over time come back to bite Apple in the ass.


If you're as conversant on this as you sound, some verrry interesting notions.


See my comments on reverse engineering above....

Burning jet fuel does matter to the environment, FWIW. Not the biggest greenie around, but always worth considering all the "costs."

I made a comparison between Bada and Android, so why do you keep banging on about iOS and C? Talk about non sequiteur and 'straw man' all rolled up into one!


Your definition of OS is amazing to the point where just the thought of addressing your little diatribe is mentally exhausting. I'm beginning to see a pattern here...You know that question I asked above? No need to answer it. Carry on. (where's that salute smilie AI?)

I'm not sure what is your concern. Mobile phones already are not manufactured in the US, so there is nothing to loose there.

There is a difference between the company designing the product and the company manufacturing the product. Samsung is simply building the chip to Apple's specifications. Apple owns the designs and the intellectual property.


No Apple would not allow that.

You know how these large companies work. Samsung's engineering department and manufacturing department don't have full access to each others information. I seriously doubt Samsung's chip engineers have access to Apple's chip designs.

Why would Samsung risk a lawsuit, risk its contracts and good standing with Apple, as well as good standing with anyone else who may want to use its manufacturing facilities? Stealing Apple's IP would not be worth it for many reasons.

You are merely claiming straw man arguments. We are comparing Samsung to Apple here. You are mistaken twice. iOS is compiled to native code, and it has a better OS team. Bada is not going to compete.

non sequiteur and 'straw man' my ass.

I'll just point out legal reverse engineering isn't about stealing patents, it's about figuring out how something works and then figuring a non-infringing (similar or dissimalar) way to do the same thing.

Endgadget (?) posts its new Apple product tear downs ASAP, but dollars to donuts, every other competitor has them torn apart and under analysis just as quickly. Being a contract manufacturer gives even a bigger head start on the process.

So I'll happily grant your main points (and appreciate the good feedback), but as an old cynic who's watched his homeland lose so many once "unassailable" positions in the business arena over decades, just hoping they're not "famous last words" from a cutthroat real-world perspective.

This is prescient!

I agree that HP could do it -- but they lack the blood lust!

MS could do it but -- they lack the vision and focus.


I believe that the MS will use percussive sublimation to "up-Schmidt" Balmer to "Executive Chairman for Really Big Deals".

Then, some Gates-mentored shark will take control of MS and say "screw the world". MS will enter the Tablet Hardware/Software marketplace big time.

MS can leave the Windows relationship with HW mfgrs intact -- exploit it as long as it lasts.

But, make no mistake -- MS's survival depends on having the 1 or 2 position in the Tablet market.

Please read that again! If not clear I was expressing the point that optimization only buys Apple so much. After optimization; CPU, GPU and specialized circuitry needs better performance for the platform to advance. This is pretty easy to understand, after you have gained what you can through optimization your only avenue is to speed up hardware.

And who said anything about that?

You gravely underestimate the need for better performance in devices like iPad. IPad comes up short in so many ways that it will be fairly pathetic up against machines that run Android much less something running native code.

That's because until yesterday's beta release of Android 3.0 SDK --- their UI doesn't have hardware accel.

Not really! Human vision simply is optimized for a wider aspect ratios.

OK if you believe that I'm not going to argue about it.

Thats 4 years behind Apple!!!

The relationship between the likes of Apple and Samsung, much like the Apple/Google one, can best be described by the term "Frenemies" - one really can't hurt the other without taking a corresponding "hit" themselves as a consequence. Besides Apple and Samsung's relationship goes back further than the latter, and has been nothing but prosperous for both parties.

Like Google, Samsung will be well aware of the fact that Apple as a corporate entity values its independence above any profitability. Apple in its painstaking and perfectionist way is already seeking alternative (as well as in-house) suppliers to as many of its externally sourced components as can replicate the quality and the supply chain efficiency of their best suppliers, chiefly to "protect themselves from mischief" (from which they suffered so horrendously in the past at the hands of so-called partners. If they had forgotten the lesson of those days in their present comfort, Google would have provided a deadly but timely reminder of that).

Apple is also aware, on the other, balancing hand, that "no Man is an island".

I thought that was: "no man is an Ireland"

You are doing it again! Is your reading comprehension that bad?

I never compared Bada to iOS other than to mention they
are both Unix based.

That's, all I said, end of story. I never said anything about iOS, compilers, or native code. I never said anything about the relative merits or expertise of OS teams either, and I certainly never made any direct claim about Bada competing against iOS.

And don't employ the royal 'we' as if you have some divine right to dictate the topics under discussion, its bad enough you keep trying to put words in my mouth.

If you go back and read the original paragraph I wrote, you might - though it is appearing less and less likely - be able to perceive that I only mentioned Bada in the context of the assertion that only Apple can do HW/Software integration and therefore have a huge advantage because no one else can do that. Since Samsung have their own OS and many times Apple's ability to design and specify HW, the assertion I was addressing is obviously fallacious. Since I actually own a product incorporating Samsung's HW/Software integration, I think I can fairly safely say that.

I didn't say Samsung is better than Apple or make any other pointless value judgments. in fact, if you want to strain those comprehension skills to the max and look at the title of my original post, it was 'lockstep'. Guess what I meant by that?

It also means that Apple doesn't have "special" battery technology nor "special" silicon technology that enabled their stuff to vastly outperform Android stuff on battery life.

Thats an absurd conclusion. What proof do you have that Apples page on batteries showcasing their adaptive charging or their 1000 cycles instead of 300 are false.

http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/battery/ If you really believe that you should file a lawsuit for false advertising.

Apparently if a team produces version 1.0 of it's GUI acceleration, no claim can be made about Apple's drivers which have been written for years and can power much more powerful devices.

That's like talking about recharging my double A rechargeable batteries with a 15 minute rapid charger --- of course that is going to destroy the battery over time.

But we ain't talking about recharge cycles, we are talking about straight up battery life.