MARCH 2020 MACWORLD 81faster at the same power as its 7nm chips,
or 30 percent lower power at the same
performance level.
Of course, design matters, too. Apple
won’t necessarily meet these exact
figures. But on manufacturing process
alone, the A14 would be a significantly
faster and more power-efficient chip.
A BIG TRANSISTOR BUDGET
The A13 measures around 98.5mm^2 , which
is roughly 20 percent larger than the
83.2mm^2 A12. That’s only slightly smaller
than my original prediction last year (go.
macworld.com/ap13), but my assumption
about transistor budget was way off.
I assumed Apple would use TSMC’s
N7+ node, which affords increased
transistor density. Instead, Apple opted for
the N7P mode, which does not. As a result,
the A13 has about 8.5 billion transistors,
rather than the 10 billion I predicted.
For this year, I think Apple is likely to
keep the processor around the same overall
size. About 100mm^2 is a good size for a
high-performance premium mobile
processor with a lot of stacked components.
If we take TSMC at its word about the
improved transistor density of the 5nm
process, we’re looking at an incredible 15
billion transistors. That’s more than all but
the largest high-end desktop and server
CPUs and GPUs. It’s huge. It’s so big that I
wouldn’t be entirely surprised if Apple
shrunk the total chip area a bit to around
85mm^2 and around 12.5 billion transistors.WikiChip has an excellent summary of the various process technologies from TSMC at
go.macworld.com/wchp.