Apple's latest iPads, the eleven inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models, are arriving on Wednesday along with an overhauled Mac mini and a new MacBook Air. First reviews of the premium Apple tablet are now out and confirm what we've known all along.
Now that a Chinese regulatory filing has all but confirmed a new iPad-focused Apple media event this month, fresh new details pertaining to the upcoming refresh continue trickling in on an almost daily basis. According to Brazilian iOS developer Guilherme Rambo, the 2018 iPad Pro refresh will include a new Apple-designed A12X Bionic system-on-a-chip.
French blog Consomac.fr (Google Translate) this morning managed to dig up some claimed single and multi-core synthetic benchmarks from Geekbench's database showing alleged CPU and GPU speed gains plus other improvements for the upcoming Apple A12 system-on-a-chip destined to power 2018's upcoming iPhone X and iPad models.
Commercial production has begun on TSMC’s 7nm chip. This is the same chip likely to be found in Apple’s upcoming A12 processor for all three 2018 iPhone models.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the world's largest contract chip maker, is in the early stage of development and testing of manufacturing processes in preparation for Apple's next-generation A12 chips for 2018 iPhones.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has been exclusively fabricating Apple's in-house designed mobile chips for iOS devices since 2015 and the company has now reportedly accelerated its efforts to build seven-nanometer chips in 2018.
Chip foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which counts Apple as its biggest client, is ready to move its cutting-edge seven-nanometer process technology to volume production in 2018.
According to DigiTimes, an improved version of TSMC's seven-nanometer process using extreme ultraviolet technology will be ready for volume production in 2018, according to company co-CEO CC Wei.
The firm's five-nanometer node is slated to enter risk production in 2019, Wei added.
TSMC currently makes A10 chips for iPhone 7 and is said to be exclusively churning out the upcoming Apple-designed A11 processors for iPhone 8 and other 2017 iOS devices.
TSMC in April reportedly began stockpiling A11 chips for 2017 iPhones.
The firm should step up its pace of inventory building from June onward, said industry sources.
iPhone 8's A11 system-on-a-chip should be built on TSMC's ten-nanometer process technology, yielding faster performance and lower power consumption.
The A11 Fusion chip inside iPhone 7 is being manufactured on TSMC's 16-nanometer node.
Apple is building a brand new chip dedicated to artificial intelligence and machine learning, Bloomberg said recently, but it's unclear if the new chip will make its way into iPhone 8.
Both in-house designed 'A10' and 'A11' chips for this year's iPhone 7 and 2017 iPhones/iPads, respectively, are believed to be manufactured solely by Taiwan's semiconductor foundry TSMC (sorry, Samsung).
According to Nikkei Asian Review, Intel is now perfectly poised to give TSMC a good run for its money in as little as two years because any Apple chips after the A10/A11 should be fabricated by Intel.
The recently signed licensing deal between Intel and UK-based ARM Holdings lets the former fabricate chips for smartphones based on the latter's CPU technology.