Apple is the teacher’s pet; TSMC allegedly hikes the price of the A15 Bionic by only 3%
Inside a TSMC chip fab
Apple is able to get away with paying only 3% more for its chips thanks to its position as the foundry’s top customer. But that doesn’t mean that both tech giants don’t have some big decisions to make. TSMC is going to have to decide whether it remains viable for the foundry to put all its eggs in one basket and spend all of its R&D and capital expenditure budgets on advanced process nodes that only a few top tech firms are interested in.
As for Apple, it will have to decide whether it keeps its profit margins the same by hiking the price of the 2021 iPhone models to cover the additional costs of the chips, or if it keeps pricing the same and eats the 3% higher costs of the A15 Bionic. And as we previously pointed out, Samsung did cut the prices on its 2021 flagship models from $200 to nearly $400. This gives Apple something else to think about.
GPU belonging to Apple’s A15 Bionic chip outscores A14 and Exynos 2200 in benchmark test
Tipster spreads the results of the A15 Bionic’s benchmark test
While the A14 Bionic is manufactured using TSMC’s 5nm process node, the A15 Bionic uses the foundry’s more advanced N5P mode which means that the chip inside the iPhone 13 line will be more powerful while using less energy. Next year’s iPhone 14 series was originally expected to use the 3nm process node. However, recently TSMC admitted to a delay that would result in the 4nm process node being used on the A16 Bionic.
As a result, the iPhone 14 line might not be as powerful and energy-efficient as originally hoped although there should be a small improvement in both.
