Sad to say, but we should not expect a 4nm fabrication process from the Apple A16 Bionic chip. TSMC will be responsible for the manufacturing process of this chip, and a recent leak shows that they plan on sticking to 5nm. This might seem like a very bad move from Apple and TSMC, but there is a little black story.
The TSMC 4nm fabrication process is simply the 5nm process, just with little adjustments. So using the 4nm process on the A16 bionic might make no sense. But, using a “new chip” that is very similar to the previous generation on the iPhone 14 Pro series sounds uncanny.
As we already know, only the Pro models will make use of the Apple A16 Bionic chips. The non-Pro models will make use of last year’s A15 Bionic chips. The new chips will only feature slight changes to CPU and GPU performance. For storage, its LPDDR5 RAM will also be better than that on last year’s processors. Does this give the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 a chance to shine?
The same processor repetition will reflect on this year’s MacBook Air. The coming laptop that’ll be unveiled along with the iPhone 14 series will make use of the M1 processor. We will have to wait until next year for new generation processors. Then we begin to see processors that feature actual improvements.
