Apple (Apple), said at a conference in the iPhone 7 published A10 Fusion a number of transistors on a chip is as high as 3.3 billion, a lot higher than A9, it is not hard to imagine the chip size should be greater than the Fusion A9 A10, manufacturing costs relatively increase.

According to The Motley Fool, carrying on The number of transistors to Fusion A10 chip, Fusion A10 outside The original estimate of The size should be from The last generation of A9 chip 104.5 square millimeter increase to 150 square millimeters, but according to reports, published foreign professional dismantling team Chipworks A10 Fusion chip core area is 125 square millimeters, only increased by 20% than The A9 chip.

Grain size and yield is inversely proportional to normally, the bigger the grain yield is lower, and every piece of wafer can cut grain quantity is less, so under the premise that the wafer price difference is not big, manufacturing costs are significantly higher than A9 A10. Although Fusion chip size really is greater than the A9 A10, but actual area than expected to reduce a lot, not only to fully demonstrate the apple design capability of the engineering team, also is expected to save hundreds of millions of dollars of costs for apple.

IPhone7 Fusion A10 chip design or to save hundreds of millions of apple

According to the semiconductor industry analyst Handel Jones estimates, wafer cost $8400 per next film, every piece of wafer can cut 125 and 150 square centimeters of grain number 383 and 313 respectively, assuming that the two kinds of size of grain yield is 80%, and not to consider factors such as encapsulation and testing costs, is 125 square centimeters of chip cost $21.99, more than 150 $26.84 cm square chips reduce nearly $5.

$4.85 per single chip cost reduction might seem small, but if multiplied by the next year the iPhone and iPhone 7 July Plus 120 million sales forecast, the amount will be $582 million, is very considerable. Perhaps some people think that the iPhone is apple's flagship model, should not haggle over every ounce on cost, but wait until a year later mobile phone prices drop, will be more highlights the value of the chip costs saved by.

In apple's annual sales 200 million cell-phone operating scale, increase research and development costs, namely one-off costs in the process of new product development, such as manpower, equipment and product testing, design is easier to produce products, better able to achieve cost efficiency, this is the best example of the apple through the research and development to improve cost structure.