Back to APPLE for the future pathway news ....
http://www.cultofmac.com/191388/apples-chip-roadmap-quad-core-a6x-in-2013-64-...Remember, APPLE has exclusivity agreements with ARM that says APPLE gets the new stuff a full year before anybody else sees it. This is bad enough by itself, but what is making things worse is that early in that "first peek" year APPLE is running around signing up all the production capacity out there at the new required lower nanometer levels.
APPLE actually produces these new chips for most of a year to get enough of them to do a major roll out of a new technology level "event". They have to have enough product in the barn to sell MILLIONS of units on roll out day, much less the 10's of millions in the weeks following. And occasionally APPLE does run short of their new chipsets, but not very often any more.
The only folks who can break this early production lock out are the ones with their own very modern fab plants that also have extra capacity past their production contracts with APPLE. For example, Samsung is making the current APPLE S6 chipset, so right now APPLE and Samsung (Exynos) are the only ones shipping A-15 dual cores with everybody else who is shipping a A-15 product is having to us the Exynos dual core A-15 chipset.
Why is this? ARM, well bribed by APPLE's lust for the latest and greatest has only released the new designs at the very lowest nanometer levels that APPLE can just barely reach.
The rest of the fab plants are struggling to meet the existing demand for larger nanometer chips and have not converted anything much to the 28 nanometer level required by A-15. Some have stared their conversions, but chip capacity at 28 nanometer is going to be scarce through the rest of this year.
20 nm? Scarcer than hen's teeth ....
Another thing is the release of the 64 bit A-57 at 20 nanometers. If I were a fab plant getting ready to dump 3.2 BILLION dollars into a new fab capacity, it would now have to be a new 20 nanometer or better type process, not a 28 nanometer process that I would have to ramp up into and out of inside one year.
So, by the "unplanned" 1 year early release of A-57 designs, ARM and APPLE have created strong turmoil in the business plans of lots of the phone space chip supplying companies. For example, TI is backing away from the race now, having just finished upgrading to something that is 1 generation back at this point in time. They just spent a whole lot of money for ..... nothing, no competitive advantage at all. When their A-15 comes out it will be an also ran, competing against Exynos chips that have been shipping for months and months.
A-15 and A-7 are now likely going to be skipped over by a lot of Far Eastern companies as they are attuned to the business well enough to see that they need to buy in as far in the future as they can. They may honor existing contracts and buy the A-7 and A-15s that they already contracted for, but any free money they get will now be invested further forward.
A-15 and A-7 will also likely get skipped over by the knowledgeable phone and tablet based retail customers as they know the 64 bit chipsets are one year away from being in their hot little hands.
So, there currently isn't enough 28 nanometer fab capacity out there and no fab plant with a brain would be putting money into any brand new production capacity unless it was 20 nanometer or better.
Sneaky, huh? Apple and Samsung get to own the A-15 wave for free whilst everyone else is chasing the 2 year in the future target that has just been posted up on the board.
APPLE will still roll into 20 nanometer A-57 on time, driven by TSCM's brand new, totally filled & contracted 20nm processes that APPLE helped them to buy. Samsung isn't supplying APPLE with their spare capacity of A-57, TSCM is. Apple has also bought their own 20nm and better production lines that will be coming on board soon.
Phone space is going to be fragmented by this skipped generation of chips, some will be competing low end price-wise with quad core A-9 chipsets (at 40 nm) because that is the very best thing available at that production nanometer level.
AMD and NVIDA have now swung their bats at the 64 bit A-57 server market, as these chips will pull in enough money to make the investment worth their time. This further distracts the phone space world, as a brand new whole untapped market just plopped in their laps and it has higher profit margins to boot, too ....
Look at Google, sold out through Christmas on their new phone, their new 10 tablet and their new Chrome OS laptop all due to not enough 28 nanometer production capacity to carry the load that people are putting on the 28 nm production system. Apple avoids this error by locking up enough production capacity early on and producing enough chips in their "lead year" to do their main roll out event and subsequent sales.
Christmas will be an odd mix this year, with the tech goodies shipping with single core A-8s, dual and quad core A-9s and dual core A-15s all at the same time produced at four different nm levels.
Next year will be no better, with 40 nm quad core A-9s holding the low end, 28nm quad core A-7s, dual and quad core 28nm A-15s (some will be big-LITTLE combo packs) with a smattering of the new 20nm A-57 64 bit chips on the high end of things.
Year after that, folks will quit buying anything that isn't 64 bit (assuming the 64 bit ARM supporting OS versions come out in a timely fashion).
People are like that at the switch over from 32 to 64 bit on computer stuff, I am typing on a PC right now that was bought at the last PC 32 to 64 bit switch over point.
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