Digital blogger @MobileChipDaddy, who is based in Taiwan’s supply chain, predicted Apple’s iPhone 14 series chip adoption last year more than half a year ahead of Ming-Chi Kuo and others and has now confirmed the differentiation strategy of only having the A16 chip in the iPhone 14 Pro / Max.
This year, he says that Apple currently has 40 million A17s (N3E) for next year’s (2023) iPhone 15 series processors, and it’s safe to assume that next year’s iPhone 15 series will also be the only high-end model to switch to the new processor.
Tipster’s accuracy is indeed very high in some aspects, such as being the first to expose Huawei’s sale of Glory on the entire network, the first to say that Huawei is purchasing Qualcomm chips and so on, but in general, it should still be a catch-22 for internal supply chain rumors, with specific data aspects right for reference.
He previously predicted that Apple iPhone 14 only Pro Series high-end models will use the new generation of A16 chips, while the basic version is still A15 chips, Apple’s first batch of 100 million chips to TSMC orders for stock, of which A15 and A16 each 50 million.
Available information suggests that Apple’s next-generation A17 chip will be mass-produced using TSMC’s latest 3nm iteration of the N3E process, which is an improved version of the N3 process, with some improvements over the N4 process currently used in the A16, but probably not as much as previous generations.
TSMC’s PPT shows that N3E can reduce power consumption by 30-35% for N5 nodes or achieve a 15%-20% frequency increase with the same power consumption, with a density of 1.6X for the logic circuit part and a possible 1.1X increase for other parts such as cache and analog circuits.
