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Is Samsung making their own cores? The news in the article is that Apple is making their own cores now, they've been making their own silicon for the last few r
by macrael 14y ago
Is Samsung making their own cores? The news in the article is that Apple is making their own cores now, they've been making their own silicon for the last few revisions, right?
- runjake 14y agoYep, the Exynos. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exynos http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exynos
- polshaw 14y agoThe exynos is the SOC which integrates ARM cores (A8, A9, A15). The actual ARM cores within are straight from ARM.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoIt isn't clear to me that Samsung has publicly enhanced the ARM architecture in the Exynos [1] series but they certainly could and exploit that in their own products. Like Apple they are full licensees to the ARM architecture (which means they can make derivative works of the ARM cpu) and of course if they did they would be able to exploit that in their version of Android if they so chose to. There were a few companies that did that with the 6502 'core' back in the day adding some custom instructions in the space that was reserved or undefined by MOS Semiconductor. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exynos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exynos
- nilsbunger 14y agoIt's really hard to build a custom processor with decent performance these days. There are very few teams that can do it, and it takes way more investment than normal ASIC design. The people who can do it largely work for Intel, AMD, IBM, some at Apple, and probably a few other major shops. So I suspect it would be hard for Samsung to build a custom ARM processor unless they teamed up or bought a team that already has this specialized skill. That's what Apple did...
- polshaw 14y agoSamsung is making them, but they don't design their own.. well, they design the chips but not the arm cores themselves-- AFAIK only qualcomm (and now apple) have done this in the smartphone space.