IPhone 6s Uses Different-Sized A9 Chips From Samsung and TSMC

This is an unusual move for the high-tech chips, but a few fabless semiconductor companies have been using more than one fab to manufacture their chips. But for those of you who are more interested in chip design, Chipworks has unearthed an interesting tidbit: there are two different versions of the A9 chip, one manufactured by Samsung and another by Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC). The new FinFET 16nm from TSMC will join the Samsung fabs to produce SoCs on the same ARM-licensed architecture but will be a tad smaller than the Samsung ones. The other, called the APL1022, measures 104.5 square millimeters, and it’s made by TSMC. So far based on testing there has not been any discrepancies but presumably Samsung’s smaller die size is built using a process, and that process could have resulted in a more efficient version compared to TSMC’s build.

The end effect for Apple’s dual core A9 chip is that one is 10 percent bigger.

To make sure the supply remains steady for its latest system-on-chips found inside the latest iPhone smartphones, Apple appealed to TSMC to start working on the current-gen A9 chips.

Both of these SoC’s do share a lot in common but the metal layers are completely different simply because the transistor from Samsung is not identical to the transistor level from the TSMC.

Given the popularity of the iPhone – which saw 13 million units sold during launch weekend alone – Apple must rely on multiple component manufacturers to meet consumer demand. As 9to5Mac points out, Samsung and Toshiba have both provided SSDs in Apple’s MacBooks, although Samsung’s SSDs have been found to perform better.