Smartphones and laptops are becoming more powerful per annum, but those improvements carry some costs, like power consumption and thermal output. So it isn’t enough to only cram in an additional battery or add cooling fans inside, and a few strategies to counter those side effects involve shrinking components. Processors, for instance, grow increasingly smaller to squeeze out more performance and energy efficiency. That’s just about the expectation for Apple’s next iPhones and late 2022 Macs because it jumps from its current 5nm chips to a tinier 3nm process.
The numbers wont to indicate the fabrication process refers to the space between transistors on a chip. The narrower the gap, the less energy a chip needs for an equivalent or better performance as a bigger processor. That’s why chip makers are on a rather slow but critical race to shrink their silicon to the maximum amount possible, and Apple could be taking the lead next year.
According to an upcoming DigiTimes report spotted by MacRumors, Apple’s chip manufacturing partner TSMC is gearing to place its 3nm process into production to satisfy Apple’s product launches for the last half of 2022. This builds on an identical report back in June, but the update specifically names Apple because of the beneficiary of this new technology.
This means that the iPhone 14 and late 2022 Macs could accompany Apple A and M processors supported that 3nm process. the present Apple A14 and Apple M1 chips both use a 5nm process, which is really on par or before the competition. However, a jump to TSMC’s 3nm process is advertised to bring a minimum of a tenth performance boost and a 20% increase in energy efficiency.
That said, there also are reports that refute the target Apple products for these new chips. One, especially, says that the 3nm processor will be heading to a replacement iPad Pro model first, while subsequent year’s iPhone will accompany a 4nm process chip instead.
