Wednesday, February 22, 2023 12:04 pmWednesday, February 22, 20232 Comments

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Apple has cornered the market, freezing out rivals, by ordering 100% of chips produced using TSMC’s N3 first-generation 3nm process. These extremely efficient and powerful chips will likely first be used in this year’s iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Ultra as well as new MacBook models expected to launch in the second half of 2023.

Apple’s current 5nm (N5P) M2 Max features 67 billion transistors, 400GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, and up to 96GB of fast, low-latency unified memory.

Tim Hardwick for MacRumors:

According to a paywalled DigiTimes report, Apple has procured 100% of the initial N3 supply, which is said to have a high yield, despite the higher costs involved and the decline in the foundry’s utilization rate in the first half of 2023. Mass production of TSMC’s 3nm process began in late December, and the foundry has scaled up process capacity at a gradual pace with monthly output set to reach 45,000 wafers in March, according to the report’s sources.

Apple is widely expected to adopt TSMC’s 3nm technology this year for the A17 Bionic chip likely to power the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max models. The 3nm technology is said to deliver a 35% power efficiency improvement over 4nm, which was used to make the A16 Bionic chip for the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max…

The 3nm technology will offer improved performance and better power efficiency compared to the current chips manufactured on a 5-nanometer process, including the M2 Pro found in Apple’s current high-end Mac mini and the M2 Pro and ‌M2‌ Max used in its latest 14 and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.

MacDailyNews Take: So, Apple will exclusively offer 3nm chips in 2023 as Android falls even further behind. Even if they used the 3nm process, Qualcomm et al. simply cannot compete with Apple Silicon.

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