While Intel and the rest of the industry have been in a state of shock since Apple unveiled its M1 laptop chip last month, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is not standing still. According to a leaker, the Santa Clara, California-headquartered semiconductor company has two Apple M1 competitor chips in prototype stages that are apparently “almost ready”.
Apple is reportedly planning to manufacture next year's iPhone, iPad and Mac chips on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's (TSMC) 5nm+ and 4nm process technologies. By comparison, the current A14 chips in the latest iPhones and the M1 chips in the new MacBook Air, Mac mini and 13-inch MacBook Pro are being fabbed on TSMC's five-nanometer process.
The baseline $999 model of Apple's refreshed MacBook Air notebook, powered by its new M1 laptop chip, comes with seven graphics cores instead of eight. That's because Apple is salvaging some weaker chips by disabling one core, a process known as binning.
Tucked away as a side-note in today’s report by The China Times newspaper outlining the first Apple Silicon products is a mention of Apple’s next-generation A15 system-on-a-chip.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has been churning out Apple's custom chips in its facilities in Taiwan, but Apple may be looking to boost domestic chip production.
According to an ex-Intel engineer, bad quality assurance of Intel's Skylake chips has reinforced the notion within Apple that the company should hasten its long-expected switch to its own in-house designed desktop chips based on its custom sic lion in iOS devices.
Apple's next-generation mobile processor that will power this year's iPhone and iPad models, tentatively named "A14 Bionic", will reportedly enter mass production in the second quarter of this year, in time for new iPhones in September.
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.
Apple could do without Qualcomm's wireless modems in iPhones as soon as 2022.
Broadcom today announced a renewal of its supply deal with Apple for another two years.
Apple under Tim Cook's leadership has turned protecting user privacy into one of its missions. The company takes a holistic approach to security and privacy that starts at the semiconductor level. British publication Independent today published a rare insight into a secretive facility on Apple's campus in which expensive machines are abusing in-house designed chips to see whether they can withstand hacking and whatever other types of assault anyone might try on them when they make their way into new iPhones.
The Information today ran a lengthy story with some interesting insider's perspective on how Apple has become frustrated with Intel's iPhone modems during its legal spat with Qualcomm.