Apple Plans To Allocate More Resources To Upcoming A17 Bionic Hinting At Improved Performance & Efficiency
We all know that the silicon giant, Apple suffered a massive brain drain of talented chip engineers who left the company for greener pastures. As a result, the improvements in its A-series of SoCs slowly diminished. It started with the A15 Bionic and then trickled down to the A16 Bionic. The good part of the news is that Apple plans to allocate more resources to its upcoming A17 Bionic with a higher budget and an increased headcount of chip designers.
Apple to Allocate More Resources for A17 Bionic development
The A17 Bionic is tipped to be Apple’s and possibly the world’s first 3nm chip from TSMC. TSMC is reported to kick off mass production in the second half of this year for the silicon giant to prepare the SoC for its flagships: iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Ultra. In addition, both flagships are said to come with more exclusive features. An analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claims that Apple has allocated more sources towards the A17 Bionic’s development. His analysis is quite simple. He says the fewer chipset upgrades there are, the more the silicon giant is expected to suffer in terms of annual sales.
“The slowdown in processor upgrades is unfavorable to the sales of end products (such as A16 and M2 series chips). Therefore, in order to ensure that the world’s most advanced 3nm processors can enter mass production smoothly in 2023–2025, and the performance upgrade and power consumption improvement can significantly improve vs. predecessors, the silicon giant has devoted most of its IC design resources to the development of processors.”
The analyst believes that the company will continue to use TSMC’s 3nm process until 2025. It means that the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer will likely come with improved iterations of its technology available to Apple. Furthermore, they are focusing on improved battery savings, which is the actual advantage of TSMC’s 3nm process. There will be some welcoming performance improvements and features including ray tracing, which were supposed to be present in the A16 Bionic but were discarded in the final product.
The company will have to pull resources from its other in-house goals involving its own 5G modem, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth chip. No doubt, it will be giving plenty of leverage to the likes of Qualcomm and Broadcom.
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I’ll say the direction makes complete sense to me. Even Apple only has limited top talent and was reportedly struggling with keeping talent during A16. With the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 or whatever else I’m missing from the name, they did finally catch up to Apple pretty much in not only multicore but single core as well, as well as the GPU being decently ahead.
So if Apple is to keep the SoC as a big differentiating feature, A17 on 3nm would have to be a big leap ahead. I’m not saying they could have seen SD8G2 benchmarks and responded that fast, I know how chip design cycles work, but they may have estimated that competitors will be catching up back when designing the A15-A17.
Thanks for sharing!