Apple has fully booked chip manufacturer TSMC’s 5nm line for the year.
TSMC, the world’s largest chipset manufacturer, had started mass-production of 5nm chips for the past few months. Now, according to a new report from Extreme Tech, the company’s facility for the production of 5nm chips has been fully booked by Apple.
The semiconductor manufacturer will reportedly make chips for the iPhone 12, iPad Air, 5G iPad Pro, and the upcoming MacBook.
TSMC will seemingly make 80 million units of the A14 Bionic for the iPhone 12 this year. The Taiwanese company reportedly started manufacturing 5nm chips in March and production capacity is constrained at the moment, something which is also evident by reports which suggest 5nm chips will only generate 8 percent of the company’s total revenue in 2020.
“This sort of single-customer focus is unusual for a pure-play foundry, but it also makes sense given longstanding trends in the semiconductor market,” reads the report. “Ten years ago, companies such as AMD, Nvidia, and Intel were typically the first manufacturers to deploy on leading-edge nodes. These firms used their high-end designs to function as “pipe-cleaners” for the node. More recently, however, that trend has shifted. Now, it’s the mobile manufacturers like Apple and Qualcomm that typically take the first launches.”
The move from TSMC could be the reason why Samsung has started mass-production of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 875 flagship chipset. If Qualcomm wants to stick to its usual schedule of launching a new Snapdragon-series flagship SoC in December, then it has to start mass-production and Samsung is the only other manufacturer able to produce 5nm chips.
