William Gallagher
With chip manufacturer TSMC's 2 nanometer foundry technology nearly ready, a new — and obvious — leak says that Apple is already designing iPhone processors using it.
It would be bigger news if Apple weren't working on 2nm designs. TSMC has already announced that it will be in mass production of 2nm processors by 2025, and once more Apple is believed to have bought the whole of the firm's initial capacity.
Still, the new leak is at least a kind of confirmation, assuming that it is accurate. The leak purportedly consists of the bio from an Apple employee's LinkedIn page, though the employee is not identified and practically the whole page is redacted.
Nonetheless, as first spotted by Korea's GammaBurst site, the visible portions of the document do contain the phrase, "working on TS2nm." What can be read of the rest of that line mentions "TS5nm, TS3nm," suggesting a reasonably long history of chipset work with Apple.
Apple uses TSMC 2nm process 3/3
— Revegnus (@Tech_Reve) February 28, 2024
Source: https://t.co/B9wdDStcCf pic.twitter.com/r8LIIW7nz7
Whoever the LinkedIn profile belongs to, he or she appears to have had very involved history, with processor work for Apple, Google, AMD, Samsung, and Qualcomm. The redaction includes any dates by which the person could be identified, but some of it implies he or she was working for Qualcomm in 2023.
That would suggest that they are a reasonably new hire at Apple. Hopefully they'll remain employed there after Apple finds they've put unannounced work on their LinkedIn profile.
TSMC's previous 3nm processor technology is in use in the iPhone 15 Pro range. The 2nm technology is expected to produce processors that are both faster than previous ones, and also potentially much more power efficient.
Apple is expected to use 2nm processors in the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max in 2025.
Wesley Hilliard
Christine McKee
Malcolm Owen
Amber Neely
8 Comments
My two cents… worthless as usual.
1- quote: “It would be bigger news if Apple weren't working on 2nm designs.”
This is the greatest example… thanks lord William… of my mantra: ‘Bad news about Apple bring page views to your site… a.k.a. ad revenues.’
2— Loooong ago… an engineer from the chip design group said… we get the characteristic for the chips are seated down three years before the delivery of the device.
So… the chip team ‘designs’ three years in advance… so obviously… it should ge designing for the 2nm process!
Intel might be a year ahead of TSMC with their “20A” process. Sometime this year we might see the most competitive chips from Intel in a very long time. We will just have to see if Intel hits their targets.
Here you go, AI, you can get a head start on this headline: "Apple Said to Be Designing 1nm Processors"