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Kuo: iPhone 18 Models Will Feature 2nm Chips

Joe Rossignol said:
Correct, because investment firm GF Securities put out a research note stating the following: "Apple’s A20 chip in 2026 will remain on the N3P node (leveraging CoW packaging to enhance AI capabilities) rather than migrating to N2, contrary to earlier rumors."

So we relayed the information accordingly.

However, I later spoke with GF Securities' lead Apple analyst Jeff Pu, who said to disregard this information about the A20 chip remaining N3P. That information was shared by another analyst at the firm, and Pu follows Apple more closely and confirmed that A20 will indeed be N2.
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And that could’ve been the whole length of the article. 🤪🤣
 
Joe Rossignol said:
Sometimes the obvious news still needs to be reported on, and then someone will make a comment saying it is obvious, and then life carries on.
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But also, there comes a time when physics says a specific technology has come to the end of the road. We take it for granted that we will always get 15% more power or efficiency. Apple selling MacBooks at Walmarts could be a sign of what's to come. We stop innovating, and the iPhone becomes another low commodity at Walmart. Or just Tim's new roadmap after he realizes Memojis and folding phones are not "the future"
 
Great, this way Siri will make mistakes more quickly.

Jokes aside, it's great at least some areas on apple can be pioneers in something
 
Arm64MyMac said:
“TSMC marketing terms, rather than actual measurements.“

If 2nm doesn’t mean 2nm and 3nm doesn’t mean 3nm, what’s the point of these terms? How can anyone then derive any power efficiency from this?
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I think the only reasonable interpretation you can make is that 2nm is "better" than 3nm. By how much, why, and to what overall benefit in reality is open to further interpretation. Generally smaller, faster and more efficient. But often the changes are small.

We've been used to arbitrary ratings such as "A rated, B rated..." or "Bronze" , "Silver", "Gold" for decades so this isn't anything really new. What people seem to be objecting to is using a unit of measurement, such as metres, or in this case nanometers, which is normally taken as a thing of precision, in an arbitrary way. But then we often say "heck, that's miles away", when in fact it may well not actually be even 1 mile. It's just a turn or phrase. A marketing turn of phrase in this case.
 
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Rodney Williams said:
I don't really care about all this talk about the potential performance of the A20 chip. Just fix the software of all these hiccups and bugs that seems to be plaguing the Apple products for past few years of iOS, macOS and iPadOS. Just fix the damn software. Period. What good is the chip if the software is garbage?
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If the focus was on efficiency and quality they could make huge advancements in software performance without a yearly SoC refresh.

The bloat in some software these days is insane.
 
Better hardware makes the many software bugs appear even faster. Wow, isn't that amazing?

Apple should make it a priority to allow developers to make high quality software. With top-notch development tools and API's, few restrictions to the capabilities of the hardware. Their walled garden is becoming a desolated prison yard.
 
Brave to predict something that far out given the uncertainty of world events currently...

Tariffs might be a lot bigger than the chips at this rate.
 
Fuzzball84 said:
If the focus was on efficiency and quality they could make huge advancements in software performance without a yearly SoC refresh.

The bloat in some software these days is insane.
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Sometime I wonder have we really come that far from Commodore 64 days?

What we could achieve in such a small amount of memory.
I wasted way too many hours gaming on that thing.

And sure graphics today leave it for dead.
But the gameplay and addictiveness isnt the same.
And boot/load times seem as long to get to a game as they did back in cassette load days 😉

I managed a team of web designers for a brief while. They were cheap labour and lived in Bali.
Great people. Hard working. But when issues came up and webpages ground to a halt it was clear they had no idea how to optimise things. They were so used to high end hardware and unlimited storage they didnt need to (or felt they didnt need to).
 
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this will be my next MBA: 2nm M-chip, newly designed body, 512gb SSD, OLED screen (hopefully), additional usb-c port on the right side
 
Conscious that these 3nm/2nm labels are now more marketing labels, rather than the actual physics, but miniaturisation is nonetheless continuing and we're now in a territory where features on the chip are now a handful of atoms across. How much further can we go before quantum effects start to take root?
 
iGüey said:
Processor speed and power efficiency are 2 characteristics (measurements) of a very same single processor, so sure can be both of them.
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The article and I were not talking about chips. We're talking about TSMC's 2nm node.

You can have -30% power OR 15% faster clock speed. It's not both. That's the way it works. Now of course you can design a chip that uses slightly less power and a bit more clock speed. But that's not the point.

The article is wrong in stating that TSMC N2 will allow a chip to be both -30% power and 15% faster clock speed.
 
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Allen_Wentz said:
maybe the rumored thin iPhone will appeal to you folks who want less camera competence.
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The iPhone has had way more than enough camera competence for this "you folk", for years.

I need the camera to be better protected, more than I need to take production-quality video with it. The current (and worsening) P-shaped cross section leaves the camera very vulnerable even with a case.
 
Howard2k said:
Because people understand the difference between 2 and 3 and can make a logical correlation. But saying that they went from FinFET to GAA is much more difficult for most people to understand and compare. There is a size reduction, but the measurements aren't exact, but it makes a much simpler point of reference and comparison.
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my question is not that 3 is 3 or 2 is 2 and not that 2 is smaller than 3 but at some point does not the electron get stuck and cant move in the laser tracks cut for it.

What would be that in real nm numbers?

I wonder IF 4 was truly 4nm

and 3 is 3.5nm
and 2 is 2.9nm

next number will be

1.5nm but its really 2.5nm then
1.25 nm which is really 2nm finally
1.00 nm which is 1.8nm and this is the end of shrinkage

that mean only 4 levels of shrinkage and the end has come.
 
Holy hell, if those performance rumors are true, along with the new modems, wifi, etc. and that battery life is going to be insane.
 
wbeasley said:
Sometime I wonder have we really come that far from Commodore 64 days?

What we could achieve in such a small amount of memory.
I wasted way too many hours gaming on that thing.

And sure graphics today leave it for dead.
But the gameplay and addictiveness isnt the same.
And boot/load times seem as long to get to a game as they did back in cassette load days 😉

I managed a team of web designers for a brief while. They were cheap labour and lived in Bali.
Great people. Hard working. But when issues came up and webpages ground to a halt it was clear they had no idea how to optimise things. They were so used to high end hardware and unlimited storage they didnt need to (or felt they didnt need to).
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Precisely

Most people program in high level languages that can end up being way less efficient than lower level languages. Sure it makes programming easy, but it means that often many software and as you mentioned, webpages, end up being resource hogs. I’m always shocked when some webpages take hundreds of megabytes sometimes in gigabytes for relatively simple interfaces.

But companies and people want fast results. What’s the point in optimizing if you are developing for super fast Apple silicon and gigabytes of RAM. And the next version is just around the corner, so why bother.
 
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