TSMC has one of its most important partners in Apple. We already told you about it not long ago in MuyComputerPro when we saw that the Cupertino giant represented, approximately, 26% of the total income of the Taiwanese company. For comparison purposes, AMD, which is TSMC’s second largest customer, only represents 10% of its total revenue.
With this in mind, it’s easy to understand why TSMC is more than willing to “coddle” Apple both when it comes to access to the most advanced nodes and everything related to supply. It should not surprise us, therefore, that the apple company has all the ballots to become one of the first companies to use TSMC’s 2nm node.
As we are told by DigiTimes, one of the most important sources within the Taiwan distribution chain, TSMC is working at a fast pace to start producing 2nm chips sometime in 2025. If it manages to enter a production phase soon en masse, the iPhones of that year could be the first to use such a node. Continuing with the order that we have carried so far, and if Apple does not change the nomenclature, we would be talking about the iPhone 17.
The Apple A19 SoC would peer into the abyss of the limits of silicon
As long as that jump to the 2nm node is confirmed, of course. As our most advanced readers will remember, with each jump to a new manufacturing process the size of the transistors is reduced, and therefore, that of the logic gates. This makes it possible to improve power efficiency and performance, and allows us to pack more transistors into a silicon chip of a given size.
However, downsizing the manufacturing process introduces very significant challenges. Reducing the size of transistors and logic gates increases the risk of serious problems, such as electrical leakage, that make the transistors unable to control their states, and that although they try to prevent the flow of current, it ends up leaking. The 2nm node is going to represent an important challenge in this sense since, in theory, the silicon limit was between 1 and 1.5 nm, at least with silicon-based designs.
It will be interesting to see what Apple is able to do with TSMC’s 2nm node, not only in its smartphone chips, but also when you decide to use that process on the M-series SoCs, targeting its Macs. Personally, I think if Apple manages to jump to 2nm in 2025, the first M-series chips made at that node may arrive as early as next year. However, I remind you that before we will have to go through the 3nm node.
