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Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

Battery life improvements.

I have to imagine this will bring considerable battery life improvements since the radio will be fab on the same latest generation TSMC node that Apple gets access too (as opposed to Qualcomm fab'ing on 3+ year old nodes).

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Why would apple waste the limited high end fab space on the modem? They'll probably fab it on a generation or two old process.

It's all SoC

Is it monolithic SoC or advanced packaging? There's no reason you can't have the processor at 3nm and the modem at 6nm with chiplets

They won't manufacture something secondary such as a modem on cutting edge super expensive silicon.

Pretty sure I've read on Macrumors that they are developing their modem on TSMC 6nm.

I'm surprised that they aren't trying to integrated it into the CPU like Qualcomm does with the Snapdragon processors.

The thermals on that would be difficult to deal with I think. Snapdragon had thermal problems for a long time. Have they solved it? What did they end up doing?

> I'm surprised that they aren't trying to integrated it into the CPU like Qualcomm does with the Snapdragon processors.

Sometimes it's not worth the hit to yield to put it on die. On package might be a better tradeoff.

Although logic circuits are available at every process node, some specialized usages like radio frequency transceivers aren't available on every process node from TSMC.

The most recent node change from TSMC intended for use in cellular modems was the jump from 16nm to 6nm in 2021.

> Compared with 16FFC RF, its predecessor, N6RF supports 3.2X logic density, 55% power reduction, and 0.38X SRAM scaling in terms of digital KPI. N6RF can deliver ideal RF performance and power efficiency for 5G and Wi-Fi 6 & 6E applications that demand both performance and power to enable flexibility for system optimization.

https://rf.tsmc.com/english/dedicatedFoundry/technology/RF.h...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16030/tsmc-updates-on-node-av...

Qualcomm fabs on Samsung "4nm".

Qualcomm fabs on Samsung and TSMC. Unlike Apple who put all their eggs in one basket, TSMC, Qualcomm always used multiple fabs -- usually rotate between releases -- to produce their chips. Qualcomm also was one of SMIC's largest customers before they were blacklisted.

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