The iPhone 4S and iPad 2 just got a little helping of Texas attitude.
Reuters is reporting that Samsung"s new chip production facility in Austin, Texas has reached full capacity and Apple has started receiving shipments of their dual-core A5 processor from the 1.6 million square foot facility. The facility cost South Korea based Samsung nearly $3.6 billion dollars to construct and is setup to produce non-memory based chips for the electronics giant. Nearly all of the facility is dedicated to producing processors for Apple.
The built in Texas version of the A5 is one of the few parts that are sourced from the United States that Apple uses in its mobile devices. The final assembly is still done by Foxconn and is done in China and Taiwan.
Samsung says the new factory has created about 1,100 new jobs, brining their headcount to around 2,400 people in the Austin area. The plant produces around 40,000 silicon wafers every month. The plant is the largest foreign investment in the Texas economy according to the Austin Chamber of Commerce. Apple also employs a large number of people in Austin in one of their primary North American support call centers.
It is anticipated that the Austin facility will also produce the next version of the Apple processor, presumably called the A6, which could make its debut in the next generation iPad sometime in 2012.