Both Apple and Huawei battle with the 'first 7 nm processor', who is the true winner?


Competition for development of processors that greatly affect the performance of high-tech terminals such as PCs and smartphones is fierce, and process rules for semiconductor manufacturing may be used as an indicator to estimate the performance of SoC. At the time of article writing, 7 nm process is regarded as state-of-the-art manufacturing technology, and Apple and Huawei are fighting each other in an appeal battle without giving birth to each other over the title of "world's first 7 nm process adoption chip".

Apple, Huawei Both Claim First 7-nm Smartphone Chips - IEEE Spectrum
https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/processors/apple-huaweii-both-claim-first-7nm-smartphone-chips

Since semiconductor chips are characterized by higher speed and lower power consumption as miniaturization advances, indices indicating the minimum circuit width, which is a process rule, indirectly tell the performance of semiconductors. While Samsung and TSMC began manufacturing 7nm processes, competition for miniaturization in the semiconductor industry is getting more intense, such as giving up GlobalFoundries's completion in the completed 7nm process.

Semiconductor fab GlobalFoundries shifts policy to discontinue all 7 nm process - GIGAZINE



At the Apple product launch held on September 12, 2018, Apple described "SoC" A12 Bionic "adopted in the new smartphone" iPhone XS "as" the world's first 7 nm process manufacturing chip ".



A12 Bionic, which consists of 6.9 billion transistors, has 4 CPU cores, 6 GPU cores, 8 Neural Engine cores. Compared to the old SoC "A11 Bionic" on the iPhone X, the two performance cores in the A12 Bionic CPU are 15% faster, the four efficiency cores are 50% lower power consumption, the GPU is 50% At high speed, Neural Engine realized up to 9 times faster by 5 trillion calculations per second, and A12 Bionic appealed that it is "the smartest and most powerful chip among smartphones" doing.



However, going back to Apple's announcement For two weeks, Huawei was an IFA 2018 held in Berlin, Germany, and announced SoC "Kirin 980" made by Huawei's semiconductor company HiSilicon. Huawei announced that Kirin 980 is "the world's first 7 nm process product".



Kirin 980 with 6.9 billion transistors per square centimeter will have 2 CPU cores adopting ARM's Cortex-A 76, 2 for high speed and medium speed, 4 with 4 Cortex-A 55 core for low speed Huawei also appeals that "chip with the best performance on smartphone", such as big.LITTLE configuration and adopting Mali-G 76 for GPU as well. The "Mate 20" series equipped with Kirin 980 will be officially announced on October 16, 2018.



Both Apple and Huawei say "World's First 7-nm Process Chip", but as for Huawei's announcement of the chips themselves, the iPhone XS series is likely to be released as a product as soon as possible. So, it seems to be said that Apple's title for "the world's first 7 nm process adoption product" is said to be equivalent, TSMC of semiconductor fab that is in charge of manufacturing both Apple's A12 Bionic and Huawei (HiSilicon) Kirin 980 There is no objection on being a true winner.

·bonus
Huawei made a meaningful tweet on Official Twitter "Thank you for keeping the same, thank you, see you in London on October 16, 2018".


This can be seen as a provocative message from Huawei that "Apple's new iPhone XS / XS Max / XR will not change with key concept". On October 16th, as a recital of the Mate 20 series, Huawei feels like bashing against Apple.

Related Posts:

in Mobile,   Hardware, Posted by darkhorse_log