On April 12, Taiwan's Media Lianhe Bao latest reported that TSMC's 3nm process has recently made a major breakthrough, and this process, which has been delayed due to technical limitations in development, is about to be launched. TSMC decided to mass-produce the second version of the 3nm process N3B this year, and in August this year, it launched the eighth phase of the R&D center of Hsinchu 12 factory and the P5 factory of Nanke 18 plant.
It has been revealed that TSMC's 3nm process will be put into production at a later date, and the initial output is expected to be between 40,000 and 50,000 pieces per month. The current generation of 3nm process is called "N3B", after which TSMC will launch a stronger iteration version of "N3E", which is expected to be put into production in 2023. TSMC 3nm will use FinFET technology to formally confront Samsung's GAA technology.
According to the past practice, Apple's latest generation of mobile phone chips will be based on TSMC's latest process technology, that is, A16 will use the 3nm process. However, according to Sina Technology, Apple A16 has been determined to be based on TSMC's 4nm process and has begun trial production, which seems to be really out of reach for the latest 3nm process.
However, this is also understandable. Apple's iPhone sales exceed 100 million per year, A16 chip using a more mature 4nm process production, can have a stable, sufficient supply guarantee, do not worry about the 3nm process capacity affected the sales of iPhone 14. In addition, the early 3nm process is also a certain risk, after the A14 first TSMC 5nm, resulting in the iPhone 12 series of serious fever, it is estimated that Apple does not dare to take another risk.
It is understood that Apple A16 will continue to maintain a 2+4 6-core CPU architecture design, compared with the previous generation performance increase of about 20%, speculation will be by updating the CPU architecture and improving energy efficiency to improve the overall performance of the processor. In addition, the A16 chip will also support 5G dual-band, the new generation of LPDDR5 and WiFi5E and other technologies.
Of course, the A16 chip will still be divided into two versions, the full blood version and the residual blood version, the main difference should be the number of GPU cores and CPU frequency. It is reported that the A16 residual blood version may be A15 hull, the iPhone 14/14 Max will be equipped with the residual blood version, and the two Pro models are equipped with a full blood version, and there may be a large gap in performance.
This year, Apple should not have the opportunity to launch the TSMC 3nm process, and the initial production capacity is estimated to be booked by Intel. However, the iPhone 14 is still worth looking forward to, and I hope that there will be surprises in terms of price.