Of 1,329 iPhone 6 Plus devices, 56.81 percent have the Samsung chip while 43.19 percent have the TSMC chip.
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There was early a few speculation that the chips were divided by model, with the iPhone 6s getting the smaller Samsung chip and the iPhone 6s Plus receiving the larger TSMC chip, but new data collected by an iOS developer suggests that is not the case.
The exact allotment of the SoCs is still unknown but there are rumors of Samsung taking a bulk of A9 orders, whereas TSMC will only take the overflows. What’s at least equally interesting is that the two chips differ in die size. Most interestingly, Samsung’s version (the APL0898) has a slightly smaller footprint than the TSMC version (APL1022).
We learnt that Samsung’s 14nm, Intel’s 14nm, GlobalFoundries 14nm and TSMC’s 16nm have similar transistor sizes.
With the new iPhone 6S launched, Apple expects that it will be the best selling iPhone device ever, with the preferred market being China where Apple sales are going sky-high for a year or so. This means that a supply of 90 million SoCs is required, which is the primary reason behind the company’s decision to divvy supply agreements with two manufacturers. Each headset needs an SoC, so you can count the number of chips Apple would need to be produced by 2016.
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Bringing up the same design at two different foundries and moving both of them into volume production, however, is quite expensive – Apple can easily afford to pay for it, but the company would’ve only taken this step if it felt it had no choice but to do so. It remains to be seen which SoC consumes less power and emits less heat. It’s very likely that in time a few chips coming from one of the two foundries may become preferred over the other.
