Apple officially announced! A17 chip using TSMC 3nm process
0According to the Chinese language Economic Daily News, the world's leading chip foundry was hoping to institute a price hike for its next tier of cutting-edge chips. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd. (TSMC) is going to start shipping chips made using its 3nm process node later this year. As the process node figures come down, the transistors used to power chips are smaller enabling more of them to fit in a small dense place like the inside of a chip.
This is important because the higher a chip's transistor count, the more powerful and energy-efficient a chip is. For example, the 5nm A15 Bionic used on the iPhone 13 line and the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus sports 15 billion transistors inside each chip. The new 4nm A16 Bionic, which powers the iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max, has nearly 16 billion transistors inside each component making it more powerful and less of a drain on a phone's battery than the A15 Bionic.
For next year's A17 Bionic, expected to be under the hood of the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Ultra, TSMC will use its 3nm process node. The report in the Economic Daily News (via Seeking Alpha) says that TSMC was looking to hike pricing for the A17 Bionic by 3%. But the report cited sources that revealed how Apple told TSMC that it would not pay the higher price. Apple is the foundry's biggest customer and by some accounts, the company is responsible for as much as 25% of TSMC's annual gross.
About a year ago, TSMC customers like AMD, Nvidia, and MediaTek reportedly had to deal with a 20% price hike put in place by TSMC. Supposedly, Apple received a much smaller 3% price increase. Following the price hike last year, TSMC said this summer to expect a price hike of as much as 8% this year which would raise prices for 2023 shipments.
Please like,share and subscribe for more videos