What Was/Is Chipgate?

Chipgate was a “scandel” that plagued the iPhone 6 launch in the Apple Fall event of 2015. It would seem what happened was it became public knowledge pretty soon after launch that Apple involved two different microchip manufactures to create their new A9 chip, Samsung and TSMC. This of course wasn’t unusual or even unprecedented, there was plenty of analysis that said the A8 had dual manufactures as well (again Samsung and TSMC).

One of the main bug bears was that it would seem there was different battery consumption between the two different A9 chips. The Samsung chip being supposedly more power hungry. From what I’ve heard that claim is quite dubious. My main perspective on this would be based on the things John Poole of Geekbench said on episode 79 of the Debug podcast.

The general gist is that the various benchmarking/tools/analyzers people were using to substantiate the claim that the battery performance was worst on one chip over the other weren’t representative of real world usage. Mostly they would just pin the chip for a few hours and look at the plain figure of how long it took to die. This is naive because for one phones have the GPU they can use to handle various forms of load, such as running video then you phone is going to use the H.264 hardware codex, which are super low power and efficient.

Either way, there are a lot of variables that would make one phones battery usage versus another (with the same hardware) different. And most of the data had differences that could be as easily explained by naive benchmark tools, poor control conditions during testing among many other factors.