Till now Samsung has been Apple’s manufacturing partner for production of their A4 and A5 application processors. However, for their next generation A6 processor Apple has partnered with TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) to take advantage of their new 28nm process technology and to decrease Apple’s dependence on Samsung for major component.

Taiwan Economic News site is reporting that Apple and TSMC has already started trial production of the A6 processor with mass production to start in first quarter of 2012 and device shipment by second quarter. The website posted:

TSMC has applied its newest 28-nanometer process and 3D stacking technologies to produce the next-generation processor A6, which is based on the ARM architecture and will undergo TSMC’s cutting-edge silicon interposer and bump on trace (BOT) methodologies.

As always there is no information available about specifications of the A6 processor, but rumors are that it will be based on quad core ARM Cortex A9 core and next generation PowerVR Series 5XT graphics (mostly SGX554).