It will be a cold day in hell when Apple or its suppliers talk about these sorts of details publicly.
Bottom line is that TSMC's transistor performance with 16FF+ is generally better than Samsung's 14LPP and yields are said to be much, much higher on the TSMC A9 than on the Samsung one.
A lot of people here (particularly AMD supporters) seem to be cheerleading for Samsung because this is the process that AMD will be using.
Anyway just sit back, relax, and watch as the vast majority of fabless customers choose TSMC 16FF+. It will be hard to spin it once the reality is obvious to everybody
Apple's A10 can not be exclusively produced by TSMC, which slashed its
capex by 30% due to lost opportunities in the mobile sector... To late now.
10nm is the next opportunity, the next race.
Apple's A9 is produced on 14LPE by both Samsung and Globalfoundries.
14LPE has reached "world class yields" according to very happy managers
like Garry Patton (Globalfoundries, ex-IBM) a trusted and respected veteran.
For Q4 Apples uses a gargantuan amount of silicon (more than Intel
produces). Should we believe that Samsung can ramp up 14LPP on day
one from 0 to >70% of Intel's production capacity and do so even with
very crappy yields?
Simple industry facts and logic versus
"FUD re-posted every 10 minutes
during 18 hours per day by the same anonymous poster day in and day out"
And now for the more interesting rumors:
The "Samsung" version of the A10 will be on 14LPH. One of three new
processes 14LPC, 14LPA and 14LPH (
Compact,
Advanced,
High perf.)
presumably produced in tandem with Globalfoundries like they do now.