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Comment by paulpan | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, TSMC 3nm is slated for full-production next year (2022) but risk production is end of this year. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16024/tsmc-details-3nm-proces...

It depends on how Apple maneuvers. Mobile chips (A15) are high volume so very unlikely to get moved but it's certainly possible for the lower-volume Mac products, e.g. M2/M1X for Macbook/iMac, to switch onto leading-node 3nm if yields are good.

Apple is certainly incentivized as it'd allow them to continue the narrative that their own SOCs are superior to anything else on the market.

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>risk production is end of this year

Risk production is when you start testing wafers and design for performance, yield, other tuning and bugs. Those are rarely if ever sold on the market ( Unless they are called CannonLake ). So realistically it is still 2H22 for 3nm.

And generally speaking leading edge node rarely if ever go to large die size SKUs first ( That is MBP and iMac ) simply due to yield and cost. ( Unless your customer is US DOE buying chips for their SuperComputer called Aurora. )

>Apple is certainly incentivized as it'd allow them to continue the narrative that their own SOCs are superior to anything else on the market.

Hasn't this narrative been largely shaped around performance impact on customer experiences?

Recall the announcement video which was decried as "marketing hype" by some tech voices prior to release.

If so, M2/M1X should be able to continue this narrative on a performance basis alone regardless of whether they make the jump to 3nm.

Apple M1 is on TSMC 5nm; Ryzen 3 is on TSMC 7nm and Intel is famously still on an (advanced) 14nm process.

A big chunk of Apple's power advantage (which can translate to better perf as well, since the key limits are thermal) can be attributed to the process node, though we won't know how much for sure until we get an apples to apples comparison. I agree with Gap, retaining the process node advantage will help sustain and entrench the perception that Apple's chips are better, easing the transition.

Unless something changes:

7nm risk production: April, 2017

7nm first Apple SoC: Sept, 2018 (A12)

5nm risk production: April, 2019

5nm first Apple SoC: Sept, 2020 (A14)

3nm risk production: 2021Q4

Following this trend, when do you expect the Apple 3nm SoC to debut?

Like Moore's law, the trend is true, until it isn't.

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