One of Apple's great rivals is Samsung. The opposite side of their relation is of business and friendship. South Korean electronic products giant Samsung has been selected as the top supplier of Apple's application processor for next year. Korean media ET news reports, the new chip is a shrink on the existing A9 processor to Samsung's 14nm process. It's common to "flip-flop" the development of processors so that new designs are implemented on an established scale and then evolve them by reducing the size.
ET News reports citing industry insiders that the production for Apple's A9 System-on-Chip (SoC) is under way in Samsung's Austin plant. The report pointed that the company has production units for 14nm FinFET process in Austin, US and Giheung (Korea); though it "began to produce A9 only in Austin as it is in the initial stage."
However, Samsung didn't ensured that they got this Apple's job of making application processor. In addition, the company has refused to declare what are they manufacturing or in which plant.
The news has spread in the last month that from next year Samsung will get most of the Application processor making job for iPhone and iPad. Even, Samsung have grabbed 80 percent of processor producing job for Apple. The rest 20 percent will be produced by TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company). There's been varying speculation about who will be building the next generation of Apple's processor after the A8 saw Apple shifting most of its manufacturing orders to Taiwan's TSMC. Now it appears that Samsung has reclaimed the lion's share of Apple's production needs. Though Samsung makes processors for not only Apple. Many major companies including Qualcomm's producer for processor is Samsung.
Technology expert predicted that Apple's dependence on Samsung device could gradually reduce. But maybe this is not going to happen very soon.
