The A4 inside the new iPad is built on Samsung 45nm silicon, the first processor Apple has ever designed and the first it has handed to someone else to physically make. That someone is Samsung, which will also put a Galaxy phone on shelves this summer aimed straight at the iPhone the A4 is about to run. The biggest contradiction in mobile is sitting in plain sight: the company manufacturing Apple’s most important chip is the same company working hardest to beat Apple, and both have decided the money is worth the strangeness.
Samsung is not a foundry the way TSMC built the concept, a business that exists only to manufacture other companies’ designs. It is a memory and consumer-electronics colossus that owns world-class fabs and rents out the spare capacity, with Apple as the marquee tenant. The structural advantage is that Samsung already runs these lines at enormous scale for its own memory and logic, so an outside chip rides on top of a fab that is already built and already paid for. The structural weakness is focus: a pure foundry thinks about nothing but the customer’s chip, while Samsung is thinking about phones and memory and displays and televisions, and somewhere down that list, Apple’s processor.
The 45nm line doing the A4 is genuinely good work. The chip itself is modest on paper, a single ARM Cortex-A8 pushed to a gigahertz, the implementation everyone calls Hummingbird, paired with a PowerVR graphics block, all of it laid down on Samsung’s low-power, low-leakage 45nm. It is dense enough to run a tablet all day without a fan, it came up without the yield disaster TSMC just clawed through at 40nm, and it hands Apple a chip that is predictable and efficient rather than the fastest thing on a test bench. Phone and tablet silicon lives or dies on battery and heat, not benchmark records, and a node one step off the bleeding edge that yields well and runs cool is worth more in a pocket than a leading-edge one that does neither.
The discomfort is impossible to miss, and it runs deeper than a shared building. The Hummingbird core inside the A4 is the same core, drawn by the same Austin team at a firm called Intrinsity, that sits inside Samsung’s own Galaxy S, both of them coming off Samsung’s 45nm line. Apple’s brain and the brain of the phone built to kill the iPhone are, at the silicon level, near-twins. Apple hands Samsung the full specification of its processor, the clocks and the power budget and the layout, while Samsung’s own chip designers work the next building, and Apple has just bought Intrinsity outright this spring to make sure the core after this one belongs to Apple alone. Apple knows exactly what it is sitting next to. It keeps the deal anyway because nobody else can build the A4 at this volume and quality, full stop. The two companies will be dragging each other through courtrooms over phone designs soon enough, and the foundry contract will sit underneath the whole feud like a mortgage neither side can afford to default on.
On raw manufacturing Samsung is a step behind and does not pretend otherwise. TSMC is the larger, more focused foundry that fabless designers reach for by default, and Intel is still a process ahead of everyone on its own logic. The merchant phone-chip vendors, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, sell ARM parts to anyone with a handset to build, but Apple and Samsung have both decided the processor is too important to buy off a shelf. Samsung’s wager is that mobile rewrites the standings. The chips that matter are becoming the ones in phones rather than PCs, and Samsung builds more of what goes into a phone than any company on earth: the memory, the display, the camera sensor, and now the brain. If computing’s center of gravity really is sliding into your pocket, the fab bolted to the world’s largest phone-parts operation is in a stronger position than its node number admits.
Whether Apple stays is the question with no answer yet. There are already quiet signals that Apple wants more control over its own chips, and it has been buying the pieces to get there, the processor team PA Semi back in 2008 and now Intrinsity, the people who made this very core fast. A company assembling its own silicon group will not rent its fab from a direct rival one day longer than it has to. Perso, I would bet the marriage holds for years, because moving a chip between foundries is brutal and Samsung is simply too good at this to leave on the table. The A4 is the beginning of something big for Apple, a processor it owns from the architecture down. The part it does not own is the part that turns the design into a physical object, and that part belongs to the competition.