Hacker News Reader

Comment by Talyen42 | Hacker News Reader

They're both on the 10nm node, but Apple/TSMC is moving to 7nm for this year's iphones (supposedly).

Won't Apple/TSMC's lead just get significantly larger this fall? How is Samsung/Qualcomm letting this happen?

'Process technology size' is more of a marketing buzz word these days than an actual indication of anything meaningful. One company's Xnm process is not directly comparable to another's Ynm process..

I'd guess that the differences between Android and iOS architecture are much more important to user experience..

Totally. Pure processor speed stopped being a major driver of user interest in the early 2000s. Since then, it has been all about looks, feel, functionality (with the exception of the brief 'core count wars')

Apple's lead is already significant. Did you look at the benchmarks in the article? The iPhone transcoded the video in about 28% of the time!

If anything, Apple continues to pull away from Qualcomm with each generation. They have a serious emphasis on performance that Qualcomm just doesn't seem interested in matching. If you cold get an A* chip in an Android phone it would be a hot commodity for the top end models.

Ultimately it doesn't matter though. You can only get A* chips in iPhones and non-A* chips in everything else. There is effectively no competition here at the chip level.

Most Snapdragons are manufactured at TSMC too. If Apple is willing to pay top dollar to buy out the earliest 7nm runs, they might have an advantage until the process scales up a bit, but historically they havent had more than 6 months or so lead. They dont own TSMC, anyone who is willing to pay can manufacture on the same process.

Qualcomm is going to 7nm next year (with the 855), right? I'm not sure that Apple's lead will get significantly larger over the short term.

Although it does seem that Qualcomm isn't really doing anything that is likely to close the gap any time soon.

Core counts between the two aren't equal yet. The A11 is still using a 6 core processor and could seemingly bump that up to 8 cores and widen the gap more easily than Qualcomm could close it too.

Samsung own processors are nearer to Apple processors when it comes to speed its Qualcomm that is being left behind and Samsung phones in the US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com