Every year it is the same thing. We hear that Samsung or TSMC will be building a majority of Apple’s next-generation Ax SoC. Then, rumors come out saying that the other firm is building the lion’s share of the chipset. This back and forth has more importance to it this year because of the perceived variations between TSMC built A9 chips, and those produced by Samsung. Apple says that the variation in battery life and other metrics should be no more than 2% to 3% between the Samsung and TSMC produced A9 chips, and most benchmark and real world tests do prove Apple to be correct.

Still, even though the difference is small, there are Apple iPhone 6s and Apple iPhone 6s Plus users who want the TSMC chip on their phone. If an unnamed J.P. Morgan analyst cited by a report out of China is correct, all iPhone 7 buyers will be getting a TSMC manufactured A10 chip inside their phone next year. Despite Apple’s claims, the report suggests that Apple brass might want to go with the firm that has the higher-powered A9 chipset, which would be TSMC.

But that means that Apple will have to worry about TSMC’s capacity. And that will probably lead to Samsung building a minority of the A10 chips for next year. Which in turn means more benchmark tests and more talk of uneven performance. Still, Apple might not be able to totally rely on one company to produce a key component for the product that produces the majority of its revenue. Which means that despite the J.P. Morgan analyst’s prediction, we don’t see either TSMC or Samsung being picked to produce 100% of A10 chips. However, we wouldn’t be surprised if Apple went with TSMC to fill the majority of A10 orders in 2016.

source: UDN (translated) via GforGames