Apple’s chipsets powering the iPhone 15 Pro and 16 Pro fashions have been utilizing TSMC’s 3nm manufacturing course of, and that might change in 2026. Apple began utilizing the 3nm manufacturing course of after its change to the ‘Pro’ branding for its chipsets, for the iPhone 15 Pro and newer fashions. The change from the 4nm Apple A16 Bionic processor to the extra environment friendly 4nm A17 Pro chipset introduced a number of advantages to iPhone customers, together with higher battery life and improved efficiency. An analyst has predicted that Apple will make the change to a extra power-efficient chipset that can also be anticipated to deliver different efficiency advantages.
A 9to5Mac report citing GF Securities analyst Jeff Pu claims that Apple will change to utilizing TSMC’s 2nd-gen 2nm manufacturing course of (N2) for its subsequent technology A20 chip. The processor is anticipated to debut in 2026 with the iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the iPhone 18 Fold, Apple’s first foldable gadget.
With the brand new fabrication course of, the 2nm Apple A20 processor might be smaller than its predecessor. While it may provide higher energy effectivity, the analyst reportedly claims that Apple will undertake a brand new Wafer-Level Multi-Chip Module (WMCM), which can reportedly deliver the varied parts (SoC, DRAM) nearer collectively on the wafer degree itself.
Such a design, which reduces the necessity for a substrate, additionally gives higher thermal effectivity. Overall, this design can even end in decrease energy consumption, which works higher given the brand new efficiency necessities to run Apple Intelligence on iOS.
The analyst additionally predicts that TSMC’s 2nd-gen 2nm (N2) manufacturing line might be up and operating by 2026, and that the chipmaker will ramp up its capability for producing extra of those chips in 2027.
Apple’s present iPhone 16 Pro mannequin utilises its A18 Pro SoC, which can also be manufactured by TSMC utilizing their 3nm N3E course of. It has a hexa-core structure with the 2 large cores clocked at 4.05GHz and has a 6-core GPU together with a 16-core Neural Engine, which is alleged to run AI duties at 35 TOPS.
