TSMC will continue to be Apple's sole chip producer for the 2019 'A13' processor

TSMC will continue to be the only supplier of Apple's A-series chips in 2019, according to a report, with the iPhone component supplier believed to secure orders for next year's "A13" chip following its success with this year's A12 production.

The exclusive supplier of A-series chips since 2016, murmurs within the supply chain expect Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to continue being the only firm producing the Apple-designed chips.

According to Digitimes, TSMC will fulfill all "A13" orders, and will likely help the company increase its market share in chip production. After acquiring a market share of 56 percent in the "global pure-play foundry market" in the first half of 2018, in part due to the A12, the Apple orders are thought by report sources to help propel the share to 60 percent next year.

TSMC continues to be a major supplier despite alleged efforts by Samsung to become one of Apple's A-series suppliers once again. Samsung was once the exclusive A-series manufacturer, but as competition and legal battles between it and Apple intensified, orders migrated over to TSMC, who now enjoys the monopoly of supply.

In June, Samsung was claimed to be in full development of an integrated fan-out (InFO) packaging technology and had mastered 7-nanometer extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV), which would compete against TSMC's own 7-nanometer process. TSMC's InFO technology is said to make its process more competitive than its counterparts, with the company also tipped to announce the first commercially-available 7-nanometer EUV process, ahead of Samsung.

The relative lack of processor producers who work at the 7-nanometer level means there is little competition for TSMC in the field, aside from Samsung. The shift down to a 7-nanometer process is a difficult and costly undertaking for chipmakers, with the majority steering clear of it for the moment.

Both Qualcomm and MediaTek have postponed their own 7-nanometer process launches until 2019, according to reports. Globalfoundries has put its 7-nanometer FinFET technology development on hold, while UMC has shifted its focus to "mature" and speciality process nodes.

Meanwhile, TSMC's mastery of 7-nanometer production is expected to garner orders to produce chips under contract for AMD, Huawei, MediaTek, Nvidia, and Qualcomm.

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17 Comments

cincymac 27 comments · 22 Years

About 6 years ago

Guess we should congratulate TSMC for a job well done.

GeorgeBMac 11421 comments · 8 Years

The interesting part of these chips is: Since their primary use is in smart phones, and smart phone functionality is being maxed out (How fast can one browse FaceBook?), is there even a need for this level of performance in their traditional market of smart phones?

My bet is that the power these chips are capable of will be opening up the tablet and laptop markets to the A Series processors... That's bigger, much bigger, that Apple switching from Motorolla to PowerPC to Intel. It will be like the marriage of two giants -- so that all that will be left separating them will be the software.

(That said, I still expect the A series processors to be introduced in the MacBook line rather than the Pro line. The Intel processors and high end GPUs still have an edge in the ultra high performance market.)

wood1208 2932 comments · 10 Years

TSMC and Apple together have done great job pushing chip boundaries. A13 will built on the success of A12 with performance improvements. With A13, next year 2019's iPhone XS/MAX possibly can have triple camera,5G(Intel XMM 8000 modem),6th gen WiFi(802.11ax),etc and XR will inherit 2018's dual camera,Gig LTE from XS. Than in 2020, It's time for A14 to graduate from iPhone and move into Macbook.

aplnub 2385 comments · 20 Years

GeorgeBMac said:

The interesting part of these chips is: Since their primary use is in smart phones, and smart phone functionality is being maxed out (How fast can one browse FaceBook?), is there even a need for this level of performance in their traditional market of smart phones?

My bet is that the power these chips are capable of will be opening up the tablet and laptop markets to the A Series processors... That's bigger, much bigger, that Apple switching from Motorolla to PowerPC to Intel. It will be like the marriage of two giants -- so that all that will be left separating them will be the software.

(That said, I still expect the A series processors to be introduced in the MacBook line rather than the Pro line. The Intel processors and high end GPUs still have an edge in the ultra high performance market.)

I expect both Intel and A series processors to be included into a Mac at some point in the near future. Intel is just a coprocessor even today, and Apple will slowly diminish the perception of having an Intel processor. Going solo with A series only may still be a ways off.

tht 5594 comments · 23 Years

aplnub said:

GeorgeBMac said:

The interesting part of these chips is: Since their primary use is in smart phones, and smart phone functionality is being maxed out (How fast can one browse FaceBook?), is there even a need for this level of performance in their traditional market of smart phones?

My bet is that the power these chips are capable of will be opening up the tablet and laptop markets to the A Series processors... That's bigger, much bigger, that Apple switching from Motorolla to PowerPC to Intel. It will be like the marriage of two giants -- so that all that will be left separating them will be the software.

(That said, I still expect the A series processors to be introduced in the MacBook line rather than the Pro line. The Intel processors and high end GPUs still have an edge in the ultra high performance market.)

I expect both Intel and A series processors to be included into a Mac at some point in the near future. Intel is just a coprocessor even today, and Apple will slowly diminish the perception of having an Intel processor. Going solo with A series only may still be a ways off.

Doing it this way, both processors in the machine for awhile, implies the marginal cost of a CPU competitive ARM is zero. Likely not, and it will mean higher prices per machine.

The biggest impediment to a CPU architecture switch for a PC is software compatibility. That really can’t be done without a forced migration plus offering developers a larger market to sell into to make the development costs worth it. Windows/ARM failed for this reason and will continue to fail for this reason.

If it is done, it will be like the PPC to x86 switch, or the 68k to PPC switch, they’ll offer separate machines, one ARM, one Intel, and phase out the Intel ones over a 2, 3 maybe 4 years.

The writing is also on the wall. Or it is a big trial balloon. Apple wants developers to move their apps to Marzipan. If they do a good job, an x86 to ARM switch will be seemless. So, 2020 if Marzipan is the number one thing coming out of WWDC19. Maybe Fall 2019 for a first PC style machine with an Apple ARM. It will depend on how well Marzipan can accommodate complex apps like FCPX or Xcode. If you see Apple announce Xcode using Marzipan, the writing is burning on the wall telling developers than x86 will be phased out.

The other option, which isn’t going to happen, is to force developers to architecture independent software like HTML/JS, or a Java style clone. Apple will have hard enough time to move developers to Swift let alone a lower performance language that will make certain apps much less performant.