It seems that Apple has managed to reserve 100% of the production of TSMC N3. Enough to guarantee a good advantage for your future iPhone and Mac against the competition.
To guarantee better performance or better autonomy, it has become crucial for brands to invest massively in the central chip of their products and in their production.
Part of Apple’s dominance in the industry with its Apple M in Mac and Apple A in smartphone chips is due in part to chip manufacturing at TSMC. Looking ahead to the next generation, Apple would have done very well: 100% of the production of the TSMC N3 would be reserved for the Californian manufacturer.
Several months ahead of competitors
Is digitimes which reveals that the brand new mass production of 3nm chips launched on February 18 by TSMC would be reserved 100% by Apple. The current generation of chips, Apple 16 Bionic, Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4000, share TSMC’s 4nm production lines.
Does this mean Qualcomm will have to ignore 3nm chip manufacturing for its next generation Snapdragon? No. Even if Apple has booked 100% production of the TSMC N3, the foundry already has a less expensive TSMC N3E process in the boxes. It is the latter that would be open to more brands, including Qualcomm.
In other words, here Apple would have mostly paid for some peace of mind at great cost. The firm ensures that it has some technological leadership on PC and mobile and, above all, the ability to keep up with demand. In fact, during the presentation of the latest results, Apple indicated that it had not been able to sell as many iPhone 14s as it wanted due to supply problems.
With this time ahead of TSMC N3 technology, Apple will be able to offer a chip that consumes less or gets more performance for the same architecture and frequency. Enough to regain the lead in performance at a time when Qualcomm is doing very well with its Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
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