Samsung to fab 10nm FinFET SoCs for next year's exploding phones Pocket explosives maker Samsung claims it has started the "mass production" of the world's first 10nm FinFET system-on-chips. These SoCs are expected to be next-generation Samsung-designed Exynos chips, and possibly Qualcomm Snapdragons, which are at the heart of today's ARM-powered Android handhelds. The South Korean giant, …
Aren't you getting bored of last week's joke yet? Cos I am.
Meanwhile, buried in all the snark, is the report that Samsung will be beat Intel to market with 10nm fabs. This is really big news: thus far Intel has always managed to lead the market when shrinking to new geometries and this lead was one of the reasons for justifying the premiums of x86. If that is no longer the case then Intel will have to drop prices and issue its own profit warnings.
The problem is if you look at exactly what "10nm" means for each of the companies, you get a rather different answer. Unfortunately the old and simple definition based on actual dimensions no longer applies, so some of the comparisons are not quite what they appear.
I refer you to the article below plus the links from it...
http://semiaccurate.com/2016/09/26/globalfoundries-7nm-process-isnt-even-close-name/
"Agreed, that joke was stale the day after it was used especially since no one came out with actual percentages of faulty units. Was it 0.01% or 0.0001% or even less that were faulty?"
You seem to be confusing the percentage of devices that are, or could be, faulty with the percentage that have already failed catastrophically. The actual percentage of faulty units is unknown and probably unknowable, but could be anything up to 100%. More importantly, it's not just the failure rate that is important, the consequences are as well. The Xbox could get away with an insanely high failure rate because the worst that happened was it stopped working. Explosive failures that put people in hospital or potentially cause plane crashes tend to be taken a little more seriously, so even a failure rate as low as 0.1% can be a pretty big deal. In addition, the time frame is important. The Xbox failure rate is estimated to have been somewhere around 25% (some estimates go as high as 50% or more), but that's for failure within the guarantee period of a year or two. Samsung had enough reports to know that there was a serious problem only 12 days after the product was released. Sure, only 0.1% might have exploded so far, but that's for a device that didn't even manage to last 2 months on the market. How many might have exploded given another couple of years? Impossible to say, but it would certainly have been more than have so far.
Guess you don't like it when for a change Samsung is taking on the chin from El Reg instead of Apple! You will probably be seeing references to exploding phones in Samsung articles for at least a year from them, better get used to it!
As for Intel, first of all Samsung's 10nm is not all that much better than Intel's 14nm, is nowhere close to Intel's 10nm, and isn't as good as TSMC's 10nm either. See: https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/content/6160-2016-leading-edge-semiconductor-landscape.html.
Secondly, you're an idiot if you think x86 premiums have anything to do with a process lead. It is because Intel has an effective monopoly on high performance x86 CPUs. Only AMD designing and Global Foundries fabbing CPUs that can beat Intel's top CPUs consistently for several years would cut into Intel's profit margin - like they did with the Opteron and Athlon 64 before Intel finally abandoned the Pentium 4 dead end and went with Core.
I realise most cockups by Multinationals are generally down to incompetence, but this (exploding phones) is looking more like Industrial Sabotage.
Both Samsung and Apple will have sleeper employees (on each of the respective payrolls) in each company, "fact finding" on behalf of the other.
I'm starting to wonder if that extends to planting malware infected charging firmware. Steve Jobs pretty much said he would give up at nothing to those stealing ideas. Has this become an ethos in Apple?, with stop at nothing, destructive tendencies towards 'cloners'.
It's certainly possible. It's that, or some end to end encryption Samsung were thinking of rolling out, which certain States didn't like. I don't believe Samsung are this incompetent, maybe naive. It seems as though, something / someone is trying to destroy the Brand.
The problem in the future is, if it looks like a Note 7, smells like a Note 7. It is a Note 7 - and Banned. The least worst outcome in this is Samsung gets itself wrapped up in Paperwork, giving competitors a head start.
Industrial Sabotage aimed at destroying a competitor’s reputation or market prospects is one thing. Doing something which would or could potentially be cause of multiple deaths is quite another.
But that could never happen, could it? I mean, companies behaving like civilised nation states?
About the Note 7 would just end.
I ordered the "Insurgent" pack that comes with 8 note 7s, an over-shirt vest with 8 red coloured pouches on it to carry them in with built in 8 port USB charging unit, digital countdown clock on the front and clip on beard.
Ive now got nothing to wear on Halloween, thanks Samsung you've made me look a right twat. Im going to have to go dressed as a Slutty Frankenstein Monster now...so yeah thanks.
there are 27 recorded incidents of note 7's catching fire. iphones, (pick a number), had significantly more. Even the perfectly successful s7 has had its fair share, along with every other "pick a name" phone vendor in the market. What I don't get, is the insanity of the campaign against the note 7. 27 out of 2.5 million, is not a lot... taking shots at the note 7 trended, and all sorts of blogs(including this one) and "trying to be funny" people got on the bandwagon, sending it all viral. A popular spiral, out of all proportion. It even got banned on planes, all around the world, with no logical explanation, or reasoning, other than somebody saw on FB that a note 7 can burn,, so fuck it, bann them all. The note 7 is surely not the first phone to set fire on a plane, I have never seen, or heard of such a wide-scale device reaction in aviation, for a phone, and it is shocking that authorities are willing to do this, based on nothing else but popular media. The Note 7 production was not stopped because they could not fix it. there was basically nothing to fix. The media, and an army of fanboys, and shameless idiots killed it, and samsung saw no way out of the situation, other than to kill this fantastic phone. it was the best mobile phone ever built. And I am gutted that it was killed like this.
Seems pro-Samsung people are making out that last week's very serious and legitimate criticism of Samsung's rush to market of faulty products are just jokes. No joke. Not funny.
However, I'll give Samsung credit for their legitimate business. And chip fabrication is something Samsung does well.
Samsung should stick to chip fabrication and TVs, not rush products to market to compete with Apple, who are in fact a large customer for Samsung's chips. Samsung should stick to their legitimate business, not be pirates in others'.
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