It seems that Apple managed to reserve 100% of the production of TSMC N3. Enough to guarantee a good lead for his future iPhone and Mac over the competition.
Source: FRANDROID-Robin WYCKE
To ensure better performance or better autonomy, it has become crucial for brands to invest massively in the core chip of their products and its production.
Some of Apple’s dominance of the industry with Apple M on Mac and Apple A on smartphone chips is due in part to chip manufacturing at TSMC. Apple would have done very well for the next generation: 100% of the TSMC N3 production would be reserved for the Californian manufacturer.
Months ahead of the competition
It is DigiTimes showing that the brand new mass production of 3nm chips launched by TSMC on February 18th would be 100% dedicated to Apple. The current chip generation Apple 16 Bionic, Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4000 share TSMC’s 4 nm production lines.
Does this mean that Qualcomm has to ignore manufacturing 3nm chips for its next-generation Snapdragon? NO. Even if Apple has reserved 100% of the production of the TSMC N3, the foundry already has a cheaper TSMC N3E process in the crates. The latter would be open to more brands, including Qualcomm.
In other words, Apple would have paid dearly here for a certain reassurance. The company looks for some technological advantage over PC and mobile, and most importantly, the ability to keep up with demand. In fact, during the presentation of the latest results, Apple stated that it was not able to sell as many iPhone 14 as desired due to supply difficulties.
With that time ahead of TSMC N3 technology, Apple will be able to offer a chip that consumes less or performs better with the same architecture and frequency. Enough to reclaim the performance leadership at a time when Qualcomm is doing very well with its Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
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