Every year we hear rumors that Apple is taking steps to move away its chip business from Samsung, one of its biggest rivals in the market. However, according to code found in iOS 7 beta, Apple might still be working with Samsung for its next generation A7 processor.
Despite the fact that both companies are tough rivals in the global smartphone market, they do quite a lot of business together as well. Samsung is also rumored to be providing Retina display panels for Apple’s next generation iPad mini. For long, Samsung has developed chips for Apple’s mobile devices. Recently it was rumored that Apple would move all of this business away from Samsung to TSMC, but later reports suggests that Apple would stick with Samsung because apparently TSMC can’t yet produce chips at the quantity Samsung is able to.
Inside the iOS 7 beta filesystem, a developer called Nick Frey has discovered references to s5l8960x processor. The version number is higher than s5l8950x and sl58955x which correspond to both the A6 and A6X processor respectively. 9to5Mac claims that analysis done by someone familiar with Apple’s chip design process reveals that the main system on chip may include Samsung components, particularly for powering the display. The same source has also reportedly revealed that processing speed issues for A7 and A8 processors have also been resolved.
The next generation A7 processor will debut in upcoming Apple devices, the iPhone 5S is believed to be the first such device to be powered by the A7 chip.
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