Bad quality assurance of Skylake reportedly accelerated Apple’s plans to ditch Intel
Quality assurance for the Skylake chip was “abnormally bad”, apparently hastening Apple’s plan to start using its own in-custom chips in Macs.
Chip
TSMC’s upcoming $12 billion US semiconductor plant and “Made in USA” iPhones
Former Apple engineer Jean-Louis Gassée in his Monday Note column analyzes the repercussion of the move and potential problems that it may solve.
Bloomberg: First Macs featuring 8-core Apple CPUs built on 5nm process arriving in 2021
The project has been going for several years, filing as Apple’s most ambitious computer chip initiative to date.
Kuo: Apple would pay 40-60% less for the CPU by switching away from Intel
In Kuo’s mind, ARM-powered Macs would help boost annual Mac sales from about twenty million units currently to as many as thirty million units over time.
2020 iPad Pro’s A12Z chip could be a rebadged A12X that enables a previously latent GPU core
Apple’s A12Z Bionic chip that debuted in the new iPad Pro last week is probably a rebranded A12X Bionic processor from 2018 that activates a previously disabled graphics core.
Former iPhone GPU supplier Imagination signs a new license agreement with Apple
Imagination and Apple have signed a new license agreement allowing the latter to use Imagination’s intellectual property in its own designs in exchange for license fees.
5nm A14 chips for this year’s iPhones will reportedly enter production in the second quarter
According to DigiTimes, TSMC will remain Apple’s sole foundry partner for the chips that will power the upcoming iPhone and iPad models to be released later this year.
iOS 13.1.3 issues with Apple’s U1 chip are causing AirDrop on some iPhone 11 units to fail
Some of the affected units reportedly cannot be repaired, with disgruntled owners claiming that Apple had to replace their phones.
Apple’s own 5G modem may reportedly start appearing in iPhones beginning 2022 or 2023
Cellular modem development is a time-consuming process, but Apple has reportedly set an aggressive 2022 deadline to start using a 5G modem of its own in iPhones by 2022.
Don’t expect perks beyond better cameras and chips for the next iPad Pro and budget iPad
After launching the new mid-tier iPad Air and iPad mini 5 earlier this year, Apple is now planning to refresh the high-end iPad Pro lineup as well as its low-end iPad for schools.
Intel’s new 10nm Ice Lake chips may significantly speed up video compression, encoding and decoding on 2020 Mac notebooks
Intel yesterday unveiled its tenth-generation processors code-named “Ice Lake” that while bringing only modest compute improvements accelerate tasks such as machine learning, encryption, video compression, encoding and decoding by a large margin.
Kuo: Apple could complete 5G modem development by 2022 or 2023
Apple could do without Qualcomm’s wireless modems in iPhones as soon as 2022, a reliable analyst has it.
