The samsung ones seems to overheat much more easily, so a lot of people should care.
If that's the case something went
terribly wrong with Sammy's die shrink. A smaller chip with the same taping/capabilities should never run hotter than the identical chip on a less efficient last gen (larger/less efficient) process. Sammy certainly charged more per chip based on what would be almost guaranteed to be a cooler, more efficient design. Despite the fact that a smaller process will in the long run result in a cheaper to produce silicon. But I'm sure they had a bin a lot of them at this stage driving costs up. It's funny too because they pitch themselves as top tier like Intel and charge a premium by constantly investing in their production facilities, while TSMC on the other hand is usually always playing catch-up thanks to the insane upfront cost of building out the facility before orders can be guaranteed.
Heat and power consumption are pretty much the short term goal for any process upgrade like this before they soon go ahead and pack more transistors into the space freed up by the shrink. I'd love to know if perhaps Samsung/Apple just got a little overzealous with the size and actually spaced things wider than need-be on the TSMC chip which somehow didn't introduce latency, but allowed it to run cooler. Why they would do that if the space allocated in the case was the same makes no sense though.
Even taking that into account I simply can't figure out how a chip that physically must draw less wattage which results in less total heat output is somehow burning through battery and creating more heat if all other factors are the same, and since both chips use passive cooling in the same casing.
It'd be like a phat PS3 running cooler than the die shrunk slim models that replaced them. It all adds up to tells me somebody made a fairly significant design or layout/configuration mistake. But I'm not smart enough about the current fabrication procedures to know what they actually did specifically
Can't wait for ChipWorks to get to the bottom of this, it ought to be fascinating. If it turns out TSMC's old process beat out Samsung's state of the art that they just dumped billions into that would be quite a coup!
If there's a significant difference in power draw and heat, I feel like I may want to exchange until I get one with a TSMC chip.
