Editorial: As Apple A13 Bionic rises, Samsung Exynos scales back its silicon ambitions

Posted:
in iPhone edited October 2019
A decade after Apple and Samsung partnered to create a new class of ARM chips, the two have followed separate paths: one leading to a family of world-class mobile silicon designs, the other limping along with work that it has now canceled. Here's why Samsung's preoccupation with unit sales and market share failed to compete with Apple's focus on premium products.




Apple's custom "Thunder" and "Lightning" cores used in its A13 Bionic continue to embarrass Qualcomm's custom Kyro cores used in its Snapdragon 855 Plus, currently the leading premium-performance SoC available to Android licensees.

The A13 Bionic is a significant advancement of Apple's decade-long efforts in designing custom CPU processor cores that are both faster and more efficient than those developed by ARM itself while remaining ABI compatible with the ARM instruction set. Other companies building "custom" ARM chips, including LG's now-abandoned NUCLUN and Huawei's HiSilicon Kirin chips, actually just license ARM's off-the-shelf core designs.

To effectively compete with Apple and Qualcomm, and stand out from licensees merely using off-the-shelf ARM core designs, Samsung's System LSI chip foundry attempted to develop its own advanced ARM CPU cores, initiated with the 2010 founding of its Samsung Austin R&D Center (SARC) in Texas. This resulted in Samsung's M1, M2, M3, and M4 core designs used in a variety of its Exynos-branded SoCs.




The company's newest Exynos 9820, used in most international versions of its flagship Galaxy S10, pairs two of its M4 cores along with six lower power ARM core designs. Over the past two generations, Samsung's own core designs have, according to AnandTech, delivered "underwhelming performance and power efficiency compared to its Qualcomm counter-part," including the Snapdragon 855 that Samsung uses in U.S. versions of the Galaxy S10.

The fate of Samsung's SARC-developed M-series ARM cores appeared to be sealed with reports earlier this month that Samsung was laying off hundreds of staff from its chip design team, following the footsteps of Texas Instruments' OMAP, Nvidia Tegra, and Intel Atom in backing out of the expensive, high-risk mobile SoC design space. It is widely expected that Samsung will join Huawei in simply repackaging ARM designs for future Exynos SoCs.

This development highlights the vast gap between what Apple has achieved with its A-series chips since 2010 compared to Samsung's parallel Exynos efforts over the same period. This is particularly interesting because in 2010 Apple and Samsung were originally collaborators on the same ancestral chip of both product lines.

Partners for a new Apple core

In 2010, Samsung and Apple were two of the world's closest tech partners. They had been collaborating to deliver a new ARM super-chip capable of rivaling Intel's Atom, which scaled-down Chipzilla's then-ubiquitous x86 chip architecture from the PC to deliver an efficient mobile processor capable of powering a new generation of tablets.

ARM processors had been, by design, minimally powerful. ARM had originated in a 1990 partnership between Apple, Acorn, and chip fab VLSI to adapt Acorn's desktop RISC processor into a mobile design Apple could use in its Newton Message Pad tablet. Across the 1990s, Newton failed to gain much traction, but its ARM architecture processor caught on as a mobile-efficient design popularized in phones by Nokia and others.

Starting in 2001, Apple began using Samsung-manufactured ARM chips in its iPods, and since 2007, iPhone. The goal to make a significantly more powerful ARM chip was launched by Apple in 2008 when it bought up P.A. Semi. While it was widely reported that Apple was interested in the company's PWRficient architecture, in reality, Apple just wanted the firm's chip designers to build the future of mobile chips, something Steve Jobs stated at the time. Apple also partnered with Intrinsity, another chip designer specializing in power-efficient design, and ended up acquiring it as well.




Samsung's world-leading System LSI chip fab worked with Apple's rapidly assembled design team with talent from PA Semi and Intrinsity to deliver ambitious silicon design goals, resulting in the original new Hummingbird core design, capable of running much faster than ARM's reference designs at 1 Gigahertz. Apple shipped its new chip as A4, and used it to launch its new iPad, the hotly anticipated iPhone 4, and the new Apple TV, followed by a series of subsequent Ax chip designs that have powered all of its iOS devices since.

Frenemies: from collaborators to litigants

The tech duo had spent much of the previous decade in close partnership, with Samsung building the processors, RAM, disks and other components Apple needed to ship vast volumes of iPods, iPhones and now, iPad. But Samsung began to increasingly decide that it could do what Apple was doing on its own, simply by copying Apple's existing designs and producing more profitable, finished consumer products on its own.

Samsung's System LSI founded SARC and went on to create its independent core design and its own line of chips under its Exynos brand. That effectively forced Apple to scale up its chip design work, attempt to second-source more of its components and work to find an alternative chip fab.

Increasing conflicts between the two tangled them in years of litigation that ultimately resulted in little more than a very minor windfall for Apple and an embarrassing public view into Samsung's ugly copy-cat culture that respected its own customers about as little as its criminal executives respected bribery laws.

As Samsung continued to increasingly copy Apple's work to a shameless extent, it quickly gained positive media attention for selling knockoffs of Apple's work at cut-rate prices. But it took years for Apple to cultivate alternative suppliers to Samsung, and it was particularly daunting for Apple to find a silicon chip fab partner that could rival Samsung's System LSI chip fab.


Samsung takes its act solo

By 2014, Samsung had delivered years of nearly identical copies of Apple's iPhones and iPads, and its cut-rate counterfeiting had won the cheering approval and endorsement of CNET, the Verge and Android fan-sites that portrayed Samsung's advanced components as the truly innovative technology in mobile devices, while portraying Apple's product design, OS engineering, App Store development, and other work as all just obvious steps that everyone else should be able to copy verbatim to bring communal technology to the proletariat. Apple was disparaged as a rent-seeking imperialist power merely taking advantage of component laborers and fooling customers with propaganda.

What seemed to escape the notice of pundits was the fact that while Samsung appeared to be doing an okay job of copying Apple's work, as it peeled away to create increasingly original designs, develop its own technical direction, and pursue software and services, the Korean giant began falling down.

Samsung repeatedly shipped fake or flawed biometric security, loaded up its hardware with a mess of duplicated apps that didn't work well at all, splashed out technology demos of frivolous features that were often purely ridiculous, and repeatedly failed to create a loyal base of users for its attempted app stores, music services, or its own proprietary development strategies.

And despite the vertical integration of its mobile device, display, and silicon component divisions that should have made it easier for Samsung to deliver competitive tablets and create desirable new categories of devices including wearables, its greatest success had merely been creating a niche of users who liked the idea of a smartphone with a nearly tablet-sized display, and were willing to pay a premium for this.

Despite vast shipments of roughly 300 million mobile devices annually, Samsung was struggling to develop its custom mobile processors. In part, that was because another Samsung partner, Qualcomm, was leveraging its modem IP to prevent Samsung from cost-effectively even using its own Exynos chips. For some reason, the communist rhetoric that tech journalists used to frame Apple as a villainous corporation pushing "proprietary" technology wasn't also applied to Qualcomm.

Apple's revenge on a cheater

Unlike Samsung, Apple wasn't initially free to run off on its own. There simply were not any alternatives to some of Samsung's critical components-- especially at the scale Apple needed.

In particular, it was impossible for Apple to quickly yank its chip designs from Samsung's System LSI and take them to another chip fab, in part because a chip design and a particular fab process are extremely interwoven, and in part because there are very few fabs on earth capable of performing state of the art work at scale. Perhaps four in total and each of those fabs' production was booked up because fabs can't afford to sit idle.

It wasn't until 2014, after several years of exploratory work, that Apple could begin mass producing its first chip with TSMC, the A8. That new processor was used to deliver Apple's first "phablet" sized phones, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. These new models absolutely eviscerated the profits of Samsung's Mobile IM group. The fact that their processors were built by Samsung's chip fab arch-rival was a particularly vicious twist of the same blade.

Apple debuted the iPhone 6 alongside a preview of Apple Watch. A few months later, Apple Watch went on sale and rapidly began devastating Samsung's flashy experiment with Galaxy Gear -- the wearable product line it had been trying to sell over the past two years. Galaxy Gear had been the only significant product category that Samsung appeared capable of leading in, simply because Apple hadn't entered the space. Now that it had, Samsung's watches began to look as commercially pathetic as its tablets, notebooks, and music players.


Apple's silicon prowess helped Apple Watch to destroy Samsung's Galaxy Gear


Samsung's inability to maintain its premium sales and its attempts to drive unit sales volume instead with downmarket offerings hasn't resulted in the kind of earnings that Apple achieves by selling buyers premium products that are supported longer and deliver practical advancements.

As a result, Apple is now delivering custom silicon not just for tablets and phones, but also for wearables and a series of specialized applications ranging from W2 and H1 wireless chips that drive AirPods and Beats headphones, to its T2 security chips that handle tasks like storage encryption, media encoding, and Touch ID for Macs.
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 34
    FatmanFatman Posts: 513member
    Imagine in the not too distant future ... Apple exclusive microLED displays, Apple’s own 5G chips, and Apple memory chips combined with TSMC 5nm fabrication starting with the A14 - now that would demolish the competition. No more costly reliance on Samsung and Qualcomm. 
    AppleExposedlkruppnetmagep-dogolsjbdragonwatto_cobra
  • Reply 2 of 34
    Still not sure why others can’t achieve what Apple can in chip design. And, while every editorial praises Apple’s approach (concentrating on premium devices only), there must be companies making cheap devices. There’s nothing wrong with being a cheap device producer. You obviously can’t make more money from cheap devices as they priced less than Apple’s margin on iPhones.
    muthuk_vanalingam
  • Reply 3 of 34
    Still not sure why others can’t achieve what Apple can in chip design. And, while every editorial praises Apple’s approach (concentrating on premium devices only), there must be companies making cheap devices. There’s nothing wrong with being a cheap device producer. You obviously can’t make more money from cheap devices as they priced less than Apple’s margin on iPhones.
    Other chip manufacturers can't obtain Apple's focus. They must serve the needs of various customers who may not be able to elucidate those needs as clearly as Apple's internal teams, and may have needs that are in conflict with each other. Those customers may also be loathe to reveal their product road maps, thereby hampering the chip manufacturer's design teams long term planning. Any Qualcomm/Samsung chips that achieve manufacturing volumes comparable to Apple's are necessarily compromises designed to appeal to a wide range of customers.

    Apple benefits from a singularity of focus and free collaboration across hardware, software and marketing groups. This allows for planning over longer time horizons and greater depth than possible for mainstream chip vendors.

    Also remember, Apple acquired Intrinsity, PA Semi, Authentic, Intel's modem team, portions of Dialog Semi's power portfolio and significant bits of Imagination Technology's GPU talent as well as other small acquisitions over the years. Apple's singular vision is a competitive advantage.
    edited October 2019 Dan_Dilgerpscooter63hydrogenlkruppnetmagelolliverp-dogchiabaconstangCarnage
  • Reply 4 of 34
    Still not sure why others can’t achieve what Apple can in chip design.
    One of the prior articles in this series gave the general explanation for it: they don't make enough $$ from the hardware that uses the higher-end SoCs to finance the research and development needed to keep up with Apple. Tegra was used as an example of that: a competitor that eventually fizzled out due to the financial part of it not working out.
    Dan_Dilgerlkruppnetmagelolliverp-dogjbdragonwatto_cobra
  • Reply 5 of 34
    Dan_DilgerDan_Dilger Posts: 1,583member
    Still not sure why others can’t achieve what Apple can in chip design. And, while every editorial praises Apple’s approach (concentrating on premium devices only), there must be companies making cheap devices. There’s nothing wrong with being a cheap device producer. You obviously can’t make more money from cheap devices as they priced less than Apple’s margin on iPhones.
    Market leading processor design is fantastically expensive. Recall how Intel solidly monopolized the PC market for decades, with little progress made even by x86 cloners, not to mention all the alternative chip makers who took stabs at competing with things like Transmeta, or even the Power PC Alliance, for that matter.

    Then look at how difficult it has been to unseat Qualcomm anywhere but in the lower end chip market--although in mobiles that is largely modem-patent related.

    Apple is making it look easy to crank out custom chips, but that's because it has billions to work with an it has the confidence to sell tens of millions of a new product, such as Apple Watch or AirPods.

    As the previous article noted, there's a cycle of "inability to compete" when nobody can afford to speculatively build optimised silicon for powering a sophisicated watch, because nobody is building a sophisticated watch they can sell in volume, and nobody is building a software platform for a sophisticated watch because ...

    There are cheap devices markets, yes, $13 watch bands even. Tablets and TV boxes that cost $30. Those devices are so cheap they need to report what you are doing & advertise and sign you up for services or they are losing money.

    The point isn't that it is bad or undignified to make cheap devices. The point is that companies that are doing this are not going to be delivering the future, the same way that 16-bit PC makers quickly became irrelevant when tech shifted, or basic phone makers evaporated after iPhone, etc.

    Google and Samsung can alternate between suggesting that they are selling affordable phones because they're trying to save you money, and jacking up their phone prices to try to actually stay in business, but if you focus on volume you end up selling an uncompetitive product short term. If you focus on product, you make enough money to stick around.

    How many affordable electric car makers are giving Tesla any real competition?
    edited October 2019 pscooter63dewmeedrednetmagelolliverGG1p-dogchiaStrangeDaysjbdragon
  • Reply 6 of 34
    Still not sure why others can’t achieve what Apple can in chip design. And, while every editorial praises Apple’s approach (concentrating on premium devices only), there must be companies making cheap devices. There’s nothing wrong with being a cheap device producer. You obviously can’t make more money from cheap devices as they priced less than Apple’s margin on iPhones.
    Other chip designers need their chips to work across a variety of products.  That means guessing on a lot of attributes that take up space on the chip.  They often add parts to the chip for single customers, but manufacture for everyone taking up more space.  Apple is the only company optimizing microprocessors for a single product.  It takes a lot of guaranteed scale to do this.  Imagine if a company thought they could pull it off and failed.  They would go out of business.  Apple is the only company that doesn’t need to manage risk because they have a product that is almost fail-proof.  Apple’s chip designers are also very good.  I suspect it is difficult for other companies to recruit good engineers. Qualcomm’s monopoly power is probably also hindering efforts to compete.
    edited October 2019 Dan_DilgerGG1watto_cobra
  • Reply 7 of 34
    melgrossmelgross Posts: 33,510member
    This was a pretty good article until he had to say “communist rhetoric”. I know he can’t help himself, and that’s what editors are for.
    cpsromuthuk_vanalingamblastdoorGG1chiamacplusplusolsCarnagefranklinjackcon
  • Reply 8 of 34
    sflocalsflocal Posts: 6,092member
    Still not sure why others can’t achieve what Apple can in chip design. And, while every editorial praises Apple’s approach (concentrating on premium devices only), there must be companies making cheap devices. There’s nothing wrong with being a cheap device producer. You obviously can’t make more money from cheap devices as they priced less than Apple’s margin on iPhones.
    Because chip development, R&D, and fabricating chips is ridiculously expensive.  Apple has invested billions of dollars into its chip designs and has the clout to make deals with chip foundries.  Android makers barely making any profit on their mobile phones simply do not have that kind of money.  Simple as that.  The would rather let someone else do all the work (like Qualcomm) and just buy a generic SOC that's designed for the common denominator.  

    It's that reason that android competitors will never reach what Apple has done.  Samsung arguably had the money but only because Samsung is a huge company in its own outside of its mobile business.  And now, even with that it wasn't enough.

    That just goes to show that while Apple figured out that the successful formula of making their own products all the way down to the chip design, the rest of the industry can't compete because... well... their products are junk.  
    Dan_Dilgermacplusplusjbdragonwatto_cobra
  • Reply 9 of 34
    cpsrocpsro Posts: 3,192member
    Samsung has also been caught cheating on benchmarks, by running at higher clock speeds when a benchmark app is detected.
    AppleExposedlolliverp-dogchiaStrangeDaysolsjbdragonwatto_cobra
  • Reply 10 of 34
    plovellplovell Posts: 824member
    The A-series CPUs are getting so capable that it won't be long before we see them powering new Macs, at least in the highly-portable space. Apple has done processor transitions before and handled it well. One of the hints is that Catalina drops all support for 32-bit anything, mandating a standard 64-bit environment. That's a good jumping-off point for a shift.
    StrangeDayswatto_cobra
  • Reply 11 of 34

    How many affordable electric car makers are giving Tesla any real competition?
    Define 'affordable' ?
    What is affordable to you may well not be for me.
    Next year, we... well at least in Europe will see a good number of BEV's that are much more affordable for the majority of people than even the lowest priced Tesla Model 3.
    These will be produced in Volume. The VW ID.3 is just the start. The new Zoe, Opel/Vauxhall Corsa and Peugeot e208 (the latter two share the same platform) are just the start.
    tmayCarnagejbdragonphilboogie
  • Reply 12 of 34
    blastdoorblastdoor Posts: 3,258member
    Still not sure why others can’t achieve what Apple can in chip design. And, while every editorial praises Apple’s approach (concentrating on premium devices only), there must be companies making cheap devices. There’s nothing wrong with being a cheap device producer. You obviously can’t make more money from cheap devices as they priced less than Apple’s margin on iPhones.
    Great question.

    i wonder if it just isn’t worth it. Compare a pixel 4 or top Galaxy to the iPhone and it’s hard to see how the iPhone benefits from its better CPU by a margin that is large enough to warrant competitors making an investment large enough to compete. If Apple were taking serious market share from android then maybe the droid guys would try harder. But Apple has been in the 15 to 20 percent market share range for a long time.

    i think an even better question is — why does Apple bother making a cpu this good? I suspect the answer is that Apple also sells something called an iPad Pro, and they want the cpu speed for that product. Maybe also the Mac?

    if Apple didn’t sell iPads, I wonder if they’d invest less in cpu development...
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 13 of 34
    sflocalsflocal Posts: 6,092member
    blastdoor said:
    Still not sure why others can’t achieve what Apple can in chip design. And, while every editorial praises Apple’s approach (concentrating on premium devices only), there must be companies making cheap devices. There’s nothing wrong with being a cheap device producer. You obviously can’t make more money from cheap devices as they priced less than Apple’s margin on iPhones.
    Great question.

    i wonder if it just isn’t worth it. Compare a pixel 4 or top Galaxy to the iPhone and it’s hard to see how the iPhone benefits from its better CPU by a margin that is large enough to warrant competitors making an investment large enough to compete. If Apple were taking serious market share from android then maybe the droid guys would try harder. But Apple has been in the 15 to 20 percent market share range for a long time.

    i think an even better question is — why does Apple bother making a cpu this good? I suspect the answer is that Apple also sells something called an iPad Pro, and they want the cpu speed for that product. Maybe also the Mac?

    if Apple didn’t sell iPads, I wonder if they’d invest less in cpu development...
    I get that, but why is market share important when the things that Apple is doing allows it to receive almost all the mobile profits in the industry?  That for sure tells us that Apple's investment in its own CPU path is paying off.
    netmagelolliverp-dogchiamacplusplusjbdragonwatto_cobra
  • Reply 14 of 34
    melgrossmelgross Posts: 33,510member
    cpsro said:
    Samsung has also been caught cheating on benchmarks, by running at higher clock speeds when a benchmark app is detected.
    A number of Android makers have been guilty of that. Huawei and a couple of others have been doing that recently.
    AppleExposedmuthuk_vanalingamp-dogchiamacplusplusStrangeDaysCarnagewatto_cobra
  • Reply 15 of 34
    FolioFolio Posts: 698member
    To follow up on apple watch, UK's Guardian review today went so far as declaring this new model so much of a differentiator as a reason to convert and buy an iphone. Quite a rave five star review from frequent skeptic.
    lolliverDan_Dilgerp-dogchiawatto_cobra
  • Reply 16 of 34
    Samsung tried to fork from Google’s Android and failed.  If they had succeeded their chip efforts would likely have continued.  Instead, Apple’s degree of optimization can’t be beat.

    Samsung isn’t the only one, AMD also attempted custom ARM chips for servers.  They couldn’t demonstrate enough improvements from the base design to justify the cost of development (and price premium).
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 17 of 34
    sflocal said:
    blastdoor said:
    Still not sure why others can’t achieve what Apple can in chip design. And, while every editorial praises Apple’s approach (concentrating on premium devices only), there must be companies making cheap devices. There’s nothing wrong with being a cheap device producer. You obviously can’t make more money from cheap devices as they priced less than Apple’s margin on iPhones.
    Great question.

    i wonder if it just isn’t worth it. Compare a pixel 4 or top Galaxy to the iPhone and it’s hard to see how the iPhone benefits from its better CPU by a margin that is large enough to warrant competitors making an investment large enough to compete. If Apple were taking serious market share from android then maybe the droid guys would try harder. But Apple has been in the 15 to 20 percent market share range for a long time.

    i think an even better question is — why does Apple bother making a cpu this good? I suspect the answer is that Apple also sells something called an iPad Pro, and they want the cpu speed for that product. Maybe also the Mac?

    if Apple didn’t sell iPads, I wonder if they’d invest less in cpu development...
    I get that, but why is market share important when the things that Apple is doing allows it to receive almost all the mobile profits in the industry?  That for sure tells us that Apple's investment in its own CPU path is paying off.
    Market share isn’t the important metric. Installed base is. And because of Apple’s EXCLUSIVE focus on quality, it’s devices last longer and have higher resale value. Market share is the funnel feeding installed base, but just how long a product stays worthwhile to some customer is also key to a continually growing installed base.

    Now, that doesn’t mean that Apple can afford to stop growing product sales. It’s true that continually improving a product MORE THAN THE COMPETITION will increase installed base even if product sales are stagnant. Still, it’s better to both continually improve and simultaneously increase product sales.

    Fortunately, there’s tremendous opportunity to cut into Android sales. I personally term that the “end game” in this competition, and, as we approach peak smartphone, we may be entering that phase.

    (OTOH, on the horizon are ways to increase high speed access to the internet in areas that need it but don’t yet have it. So we may be in a temporary lull, and peak smartphone may still be a ways off.)

    In any case, Apple is right where they should be to steal market share (as appears to be happening in Europe) and thus continue growing its installed base.
    edited October 2019 netmagechiawatto_cobra
  • Reply 18 of 34
    AppleExposedAppleExposed Posts: 1,805unconfirmed, member
    blastdoor said:
    Still not sure why others can’t achieve what Apple can in chip design. And, while every editorial praises Apple’s approach (concentrating on premium devices only), there must be companies making cheap devices. There’s nothing wrong with being a cheap device producer. You obviously can’t make more money from cheap devices as they priced less than Apple’s margin on iPhones.
    Great question.

    i wonder if it just isn’t worth it. Compare a pixel 4 or top Galaxy to the iPhone and it’s hard to see how the iPhone benefits from its better CPU by a margin that is large enough to warrant competitors making an investment large enough to compete. If Apple were taking serious market share from android then maybe the droid guys would try harder. But Apple has been in the 15 to 20 percent market share range for a long time.

    i think an even better question is — why does Apple bother making a cpu this good? I suspect the answer is that Apple also sells something called an iPad Pro, and they want the cpu speed for that product. Maybe also the Mac?

    if Apple didn’t sell iPads, I wonder if they’d invest less in cpu development...

    "Android" isn't a phone manufacturer but a platform for 1,000+ iKnockoff manufacturers. Apple clinging to just 1% marketshare would be amazing but they're taking 15-20% and doing so with as little as 8 different models.

    Trust me, the iKnockoff companies are trying as hard as they can to take Apples well-deserved throne.


    melgross said:
    cpsro said:
    Samsung has also been caught cheating on benchmarks, by running at higher clock speeds when a benchmark app is detected.
    A number of Android makers have been guilty of that. Huawei and a couple of others have been doing that recently.

    And still falling behind Apple.
    tmaylolliverp-dogchiaStrangeDayswatto_cobra
  • Reply 19 of 34
    The core discussion point is one of culture. The Far East are pretty well top dog at copying product and this skill is viewed as an enviable asset. The invisible line of copy-morality on which one side is 'yeah that's fair enough' and the other side is 'that knock-off is disgraceful' varies between the West and the Far East. I can see that deeply ingrained culture in many students from the Far East that attend Universities in the West and get sprung for plagiarising material. In a wide cross section of industry, the copier has gone on to supplant the copied but not in the case referenced in this article (so far). Many of the iKnockoff comments on this forum are really just verbalising culture where 'yes' in my back yard means 'no' in that back yard across town.
    edited October 2019 lolliverfastasleepStrangeDays
  • Reply 20 of 34
    AppleExposedAppleExposed Posts: 1,805unconfirmed, member
    kimberly said:
    The core discussion point is one of culture. The Far East are pretty well top dog at copying product and this skill is viewed as an enviable asset. The invisible line of copy-morality on which one side is 'yeah that's fair enough' and the other side is 'that knock-off is disgraceful' varies between the West and the Far East. I can see that deeply ingrained culture in many students from the Far East that attend Universities in the West and get sprung for plagiarising material. In a wide cross section of industry, the copier has gone on to supplant the copied but not in the case referenced in this article (so far). Many of the iKnockoff comments on this forum are really just verbalising culture where 'yes' in my back yard means 'no' in that back yard across town.

    Doesn't mean plagiarism is right and knockoffs aren't knockoffs. I don't care who's yard you're in.
    p-dogwatto_cobra
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