JUNE 2019 MACWORLD 45will almost certainly be the fastest SoC
Apple has ever developed for iPhones, but
exactly how fast can we expect?
BUILT ON AN IMPROVED
7NM PROCESS
For the A13, we can expect Apple to stick
with its manufacturing partner TSMC,
which has a firm lead in chip manufacturing
technology. But TSMC is not yet ready to
make another leap to a new chip process
node, as it did in jumping from 10nm to
7nm last year. The 5nm transition will
probably be ready in time for the 2020
iPhone, but this year’s model will still be
built with a 7nm process.
That doesn’t mean we can’t expect any
improvements on the manufacturing side.
TSMC is currently ramping up its “7nm+”
process, which use EUV (Extreme
Ultraviolet) lithography for some of the
chip layers. This should allow chips with
better density (about 20 percent more
logic in the same area) and power
efficiency (about 10 percent better).
A recent report from the Chinese site
Commercial Times (go.macworld.com/
cmtm) claims that Apple will be the first
company to use a new, as-yet-uheard-of
“7nm Pro” process from TSMC for the A13.
It’s not clear if this is an enhanced version
of the regular 7nm process or the EUV
7nm+ process, but it’s clear that Apple
intends to release the A13 with the best
manufacturing technology possible, and
that we can expect improvements over the
7nm process used in the A12 and A12X.
The A12 increased transistor Apple’s
count to a surprising 6.9 billion, but the die
area was around 83mm²—far from the
largest chip Apple’s ever put in an iPhone.
In fact, it’s the smallest iPhone chip, in
terms of area, in nine years, and the A5
and A10 were each over 120mm².
In other words, Apple’s iPhone chips
are usually larger than the A12, and
particularly so when producing a new chip
with the same manufacturing process as
the year before. It would be a conservative
guess to assume that the A13 would be
around 25 percent larger (roughly 103mm²)
and, together with the increased density of
TSMC’s improved process, carry a
transistor count of around 10 billion. That’s
the equivalent of the A12X in the iPad Pros.CPU PERFORMANCE
While I expect the A13 to have nearly the
same transistor count as the A12X, I don’t
think Apple will spend its transistor budget
the same way; doubling up the high-power
CPU cores from 2 to 4. Rather, I suspect
Apple will continue to have two high-
performance CPU cores and four energy-
efficient cores, with an outside chance of
increasing the high-performance core
count from 2 to 3.
Apple will likely rely on some