The iPhone 12 will benefit from an “A14” chip engraved in 5 nm by the Taiwanese manufacturer TSMC. The design of the chip would have been finalized in April 2019. It would allow significant performance gains even with ARM core designs already used on 7 nm chips. To obtain an identical engraving finesse on an Android smartphone, you will probably have to wait until 2021.
The Apple Insider site claims to have some info on the next generation of iPhone chips – presumably, a chip called A14 and that should among other things be found on the iPhone 12. The news comes as TSMC claims that the 5nm engraving technology is ready to go into mass production. The chips of the next iPhone would go into production in the second quarter of 2020. With a view to launching the new generation of iPhone in September.
The site also specifies that the 5 nm EUV engraving of TSMC allows a multiplication of the density of the transistors by 1.8x. This translates into a performance increase of 15% if we base ourselves on Cortex A72 cores. In comparaison to the 7nm engraving process. According to the site, TSMC also praises the merits of this finesse of engraving. With regard to the areas carrying SRAM and similar components.
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iPhone 12: the A14 chip will be engraved in 5 nm
According to the report, the engraving process would indeed simplify their design, thanks to the characteristics of EUV lithography. In addition, we learn that two-thirds of TSMC’s production capacity will initially be reserved for the production of chips for Apple.
As we explained earlier, the next Qualcomm Snapdragon 875 for example will also use this technology. However, we do not expect the start of the production of this SoC before the first months of 2021.
It is worth to mention that we expect the iPhone 12 lineup to be a pretty significant refresh in terms of hardware. Featuring a new iPhone-4 esque design and an all-OLED lineup with tweaked screen dimensions. Alongside with a new 3D ToF sensor for the rear camera and support for fast cellular data speeds with 5G.
