How did Samsung get to where they are today? By going “vertical”. It’s an industry term that means instead of partnering with lots of companies to produce a product, Samsung decided to do practically everything by themselves. They design and manufacture their own smartphone chips, their own DRAM, their own screens, and the list goes on and on.
LG, looking to learn from Samsung’s ways, has just announced that they’ve completed development on a quad core ARM Cortex A15 processor. Said processor will be built by TSMC using a 28 nanometer High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) process. The first chips should start rolling off the production line by the end of this month. There’s a small catch however, LG hasn’t decided whether or not they’ll use the chip for a future smartphone.
Bummer.
The piece goes on to say that the development of this chip was lead by a guy named Sangwon Song. He used to work for Texas Instruments, which sadly decided to get out of the mobile phone race. (insider-gaming.com) The chip will also apparently have only four cores because LG decided Samsung’s octo core approach consumed too much power.
Curious to see how that decision plays out, because Samsung’s octo core implementation makes use of the ARM Cortex A7 processors that barely consume power at all.
