Apple is gearing up to release its first chips manufactured on TSMC’s new 3-nanometer node process. The company has reportedly booked up to 90% of TSMC’s production capacity for the denser technology, according to a paywalled article from DigiTimes.
Apple’s upcoming chips, namely the A17 Bionic and M3, are rumored to adopt the newer and more advanced process. More specifically, the new chips will be built on TSMC’s baseline N3 (N3B) process, the Taiwanese company’s first iteration of the 3nm technology. Production of N3B-based chips began in Q4 2022, with yield rates steadily rising since then.
Apple was widely expected to adopt a 3nm process for its A16 Bionic chip on the iPhone 14 Pro last year. However, poor yield rates and manufacturing delays forced Apple to adopt a stopgap 4-nanometer (N4P) process, which provided minimal efficiency and performance gains over chips built on a 5-nanometer (N5) process.
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Apple is also reportedly testing a variant of the M3 Pro chip equipped with a 12-core CPU and 18-core GPU, according to Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman. The chip in testing is said to be built on a 3nm process, which allows Apple to pack extra CPU and GPU cores onto a denser chip with minimal changes to its physical dimensions.
The N3B process offers substantial performance and efficiency enhancements over N5. According to TSMC, the new N3B process provides up to 30% less power consumption, up to 15% faster performance, and a logic density up to 1.6 times higher than N5. TSMC is also working on updated 3nm processes – namely N3E, N3P, and N3X – although Apple isn’t expected to adopt them until 2024 or later.
