iPhone 6 with TSMC chip claimed to perform better; Apple responds
Staff Reporter 2015-10-11 11:44
The iPhone 6S and 6S Plus. (Internet photo)
Apple has issued a statement rebutting lab tests that suggested some iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S phones using the A9 chip made by Samsung Plus have a significantly shorter battery life than those running on chips manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, reports Yicai.com, the website of Shanghai's China Business News.
Although the statement insists that "a continuous heavy workload until the battery depletes is not representative of real-world usage" and the variance is within just 2%-3% of each other, an industry source cited by one of our Chinese-language affiliates said Apple's statement is unusual since the US tech giant has not responded to similar tests on its past few smartphones.
Since the latest iPhone models came onto the market, media and tech enthusiasts have examined their interiors and found they use one of two different chipsets — Samsung's 14mm APL0899 chip and TSMC's 16mm APL1022 chip. A buyer is unable to know which chip their iPhone 6S or 6S Plus runs on and they do not make any difference to the smartphone's size. The packaging, serial number or barcode offers no clue about its chip's supplier.
YouTuber Austin Evans used industry-recognized Geekbench software to test the battery performance of two iPhone 6S phones using the different chipsets. The battery level of the smartphone with the TSMC chip dropped to 50% slower than the phone running on the Samsung chip. The temperature of the former was also slightly higher than the latter.
Another YouTube channel TLD ran two battery performance tests under the same screen brightness and camera setting. The result showed the phone with TSMC chip had a longer battery life by around 5%-6%.
Chinese internet users who ran similar tests with Chinese software also found the battery life of the phones with TSMC chips to be superior to those with Samsung chips, our sister paper China Times reported. Hiraku, who runs a technology review website in Taiwan, also created an app that can tell who an A9 chip's supplier is.
It is uncommon to see two component manufacturers supplying a single product, especially a product as high-profile as the iPhone. Apple was sued in 2012 by consumers who found the screens for the MacBook Pro were manufactured by both Samsung and LG; the LG-made screens were prone to burn-in and display flaws.
Ifeng, the website of Hong Kong's Phoenix New Media, said it is unclear why Apple has used two chip suppliers for the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus but speculated that a single supplier might not be able to meet the strong demand for the smartphone.
According to statistics compiled by an app that can identify the manufacturer of an A9 chip, around 80% of iPhone 6S phones and 95% of iPhone 6S Plus phones available in Taiwan use Samsung chips. In the US and Japan, around 60% of iPhone 6S and over 70% of 6S Plus use TSMC chips. In China, the ratio of Samsung chips to TSMC chips in the iPhone 6S is around 55:45 and over 60% of iPhone 6S Plus phones run on TSMC chips.
