Hacker News Reader

Comment by borissk | Hacker News Reader

The Exynos based Tensor, made by Samsung is very hot. Google should've collaborated with QC or MT and used TSMC to make their SOC.

View on HN

Snapdragons overheat just fine too, it's not a unique issue. Also what is actually overheating most in this scenario is not the SoC but a display. Open your phone of any brand and model and walk around with it unlocked in the bright summer sunny day outside. The screen will work at max brightness and would become insanely hot from the internal heat in very short time span.

>The screen will work at max brightness and would become insanely hot from the internal heat in very short time span.

It's the sun heating up the black non-reflective back of screen. Probably wouldn't be as much of an issue with transreflective displays. The display showing full brightness definitely contributes to the problem, but it's not the main culprit.

In my case with a Galaxy S9, it's the screen that overheats easily. It's a double whammy when in the bright outdoors, because sunlight hits the phone, and it needs to be bright so that the screen can be seen.

Good thing video recording can be practically fully offloaded to specialized blocks and doesn't need the main cores to be driven at high clock.

My iPhone heats up uncomfortably if I leave it in the sun even if I don’t use it. The SoC is irrelevant here.

Why are chips made by samsung vs tsmc are any different?

Why are cars made by Toyota and Ford any different?

A lot of different technical decisions have been made by different people along the way.

Both are producing same chips, maybe slightly different serial number. Perhaps better comparison would be why Chinese Tesla’s are better than American ones.

Are Chinese Tesla's better than American ones? Is it just higher quality control because of a newer manufacturing setup there?

Or why airlines are refusing to take deliveries of Boeing planes from a certain factory but not the others. If it's difficult to maintain consistent quality inside a single company, it's no surprise that differences like this can show up in "identical" CPUs fabricated by different companies.

No, Samsung's processes and TSMC's processes are not the same. They were not making the same chip; they each were making chips based on the same input design, that had been targeted to two different processes.

Samsung's foundries have struggled for the past few years to achieve their targets, whereas TSMC has continued improving at their projected rates. TSMC's process is now significantly ahead of Samsung's, such that the same designs are better on TSMC. These improvements are along the lines of fewer defects, higher switching speeds, less leakage, etc.

The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 was made on Samsung's fabs. The 8+ Gen 1 is the same design on TSMC.

To be clear, this is for Samsung's processor foundries. Their DRAM and flash memory still appear to be industry leaders.

It's not even a recent thing. Way back when Apple used both TSMC and Samsung foundries for their A9 SoC's, the Samsung ones were measured to perform worse than the TSMC ones. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/samsung-vs-tsmc-comp...

It's just the gap has become more noticeable in recent years. (Notably with things like the Snapdragon 888 handwarmer).

To put it in perspective, the latest Tensor G2 is outperformed by the 2019 A13 Bionic in geekbench.

Quality of manufacturing. Think about a mechanical assembly manufactured within specifications but where one is at the upper bound of tolerance and things rattle a bit while the other is a perfect fit.

In most quality systems those parts are equivalent (they meet spec). If you need or want better parts, you tighten the spec.

A sibling comment to yours points out that TSMC has better processes. That's probably a better way to state it, they can hit a tighter spec at the same price point.

> In most quality systems those parts are equivalent (they meet spec). If you need or want better parts, you tighten the spec.

Components being equivalent within spec doesn't mean they have the same performance. It only means they are all acceptable for their intended use. That's why the Apple A9 from TSCM were performing better than the Samsung ones in the same way batches of products made from the same blueprints can have widely different failure rates.

These are quality of manufacturing issues and yes it is due to TSCM having better processes than Samsung. That's not a better way to state it. One is the reason of the other.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com