There is no doubt that this year's Apple iPhone 14 will use the latest A16 processor, which will have a relatively large improvement in performance compared with the current A15 processor. And now there is news that Apple has also completed the design of the A16 processor, is about to enter the tape-out stage, if all goes well, will begin to enter the mass production stage in the second half of this year, as for the wafer foundry will continue to use TSMC, and is still a 4nm process process, of course, TSMC to Apple will be a 4nm enhanced version of the N4P process.
It is reported that Apple plans to bring the A16 into the iPhone 14 and the next generation of iPad, perhaps referring to the iPad Air 5 tablet, but even Apple will encounter insufficient capacity, especially the production capacity of advanced processes. Therefore, in order to ensure the stable supply of A16 processors, Apple accepted the request of TSMC's price increase, and it is not clear how much the price increase is, and Apple also promised to round TSMC's production capacity of about 120,000-150,000 pieces.
Previously, it was reported that in order to cope with the shortage of chip production capacity, TSMC plans to increase the wafer quotation by 8-10%, of course, as TSMC's current largest customer, Apple's price increase will be much smaller than this number. Of course, Apple, which is not short of money, still has a big hand to ensure that TSMC can smoothly deliver so many chips in order to ensure that TSMC can smoothly deliver so many chips. It's just that now it seems that there is a little problem with TSMC's 3nm process, so that Apple has to still choose the 4nm process, which is actually not a good thing.
![It was exposed that Apple's A16 processor was not eligible for the first batch of 3nm TSMC's production capacity was split in half by Intel[fig]](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACwAAAAAAQABAAACAkQBADs=)