The big tech companies are struggling to secure the necessary hardware to meet the demand of their future devices, and especially for Apple we learn that it is preparing to close exclusively for its own account the initial stock of TSMC processors that will be developed on a 3nm scale in 2023.
According to the DigiTimes website, Apple wants to be completely ready for the launch of the iPhone 15 series in the fall, which will logically bring new leaps in performance and energy management with the new A17 Bionic chip compared to the previous generation that is built on a 5nm scale. However, Apple is considered to be TSMC’s most premium customer because it pays more than the others to have the absolute priority in the mass production process, with various reports of payments as high as $20,000 per wafer, which includes hundreds of processors.
Obviously we can’t know how big this initial stock will be and how long this exclusivity will last. The 3nm production will cover both the construction of the A17 Bionic chips and the M3 chipsets for the new Macs that will be released in late 2023 or early 2024.
TSMC says that the improvements of the 3nm chips compared to the 5nm chips will be particularly significant, perhaps even greater than they originally estimated.
It should be noted, however, that the other chipset manufacturers (Qualcomm, Intel, MediaTek) have announced that they will move to the 3nm era, but none of them will have time to be ready in 2023.
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