A new supply chain report indicates that this year’s iPhone won’t see any delays thanks to the news that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has kicked off production of a new Apple-designed A15 Bionic chip for an upcoming iPhone 13 family.
The iPhone 13 Is Arriving on Schedule
That’s according to a paywalled report by Taiwanese trade publication DigiTimes.
TSMC has kicked off production for Apple’s next-generation iPhone processor dubbed A15, and will see demand for the chip surpass that for its predecessor last year in scale, according to industry sources.
The upcoming chip is expected to be fabbed on an enhanced version of TSMC’s five-nanometer process. The full report is yet to be published but we can safely assume that the A15 will provide additional power savings and increased performance.
Apple usually launches new iPhone models in September, but the coronavirus pandemic that disrupted supply chains has resulted in a delayed launch of the iPhone 12 family.
For example, the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro arrived in October 2020 instead of September while the iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 12 Pro Max launched in November 2020. The A15 should also make its way into lower-end iPads like the iPad Air. The flagship iPad Pro family is now using the Apple M1 chip that has made its debut in several Mac models.
Apple’s current A14 Bionic chip powers devices like the iPhone 12 family along with the refreshed iPad Air released in 2020. Filing as the first commercially available five-nanometer system-on-a-chip, the A14 Bionic contains 11.8 billion transistors.
It sports a custom six-core CPU along with an Apple-designed eight-core GPU with real-time machine learning capabilities and a 16-core AI coprocessor, dubbed Neural engine.
Why Is TSMC Building Apple Chips?
With sprawling manufacturing facilities in Taiwan and new multi-billion dollar plants being built in the US, TSMC is the world’s biggest independent semiconductor foundry. Technology giants such as AMD, Nvidia, Microsoft, and others often contract TSMC to churn out semiconductors in volume. TSMC counts Apple as its most important client.
Before TSMC, however, Apple-designed chips used to be fabricated by Samsung. But with intensified rivalry and legal issues plaguing the Apple-Samsung relationship, Apple a few years back decided to drop Samsung in favor of TSMC.