Apple has locked in all of TSMC’s 3nm production for 2023
To show you the importance of this, let’s take a look at the iPhone 11 series which employed the 7nm A13 Bionic and contained 8.5 billion transistors. The iPhone 12 line used the 5nm A14 Bionic which featured 11.8 billion transistors. The 5nm A15 Bionic for the iPhone 13 models contained 15 billion transistors and that went up to 16 billion for the 4nm (actually 5nm) A16 Bionic that powers the iPhone 14 Pro line (and is expected to be under the hood of this year’s iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus).
Wafers for 3nm chip production cost $20,000 a pop
Apple has reserved all of TSMC’s 3nm production this year but it will be a different story next year when the foundry starts using its second-generation 3nm process node. The A17 Bionic is expected to keep the 6-core configuration that includes 4 efficiency cores and 2 performance cores. Apple used ARM’s v8.6 architecture for the A16 Bionic with Apple expected to use ARM’s v9 architecture for this year’s chipset. Apple does design its own CPU cores.
Apple will stick with a Qualcomm 5G modem chip for the A17 Bionic
The use of LPDDR5X RAM for the A17 Bionic this year will deliver a 33% faster maximum data rate which will result in a 25% lower latency. As for the GPU, many are hoping that Apple continues with the 20% performance increase that it has been delivering every year although this is an average. That means the range has been 15% to 30% higher and the A17 Bionic’s GPU performance improvement should fall within that range.
In Barcelona last month for MWC, Amon said, “We’re making no plans for 2024, my planning assumption is we’re not providing [Apple] a modem in ’24, but it’s their decision to make.” Apple has been looking to move away from Qualcomm’s controversial “no license, no chips” sales practice. This forces manufacturers, like Apple, to pay Qualcomm to license the chip designer’s intellectual property before buying the actual chips.
