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Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/1209879
The iPhone 12 Could Be as Powerful as a MacBook Pro By Jesse Hollington The A-series chips that Apple custom designs for its iPhones and iPads are already delivering levels of performance that are hard to believe. Apple's A12 Bionic — the chip found in the 2018 iPhone XS and iPhone XR — was already nearly as fast at some of the best desktop CPUs available, and the A12X variation put into Apple's 2018 iPad Pros smoked most modern PCs. Naturally, Apple made its A13 chip even more powerful, leaving Android smartphones in the dust, and now if an analysis by Macworld's Jason Cross is accurate, the A14 chip that's expected to appear in this year's iPhones is going to surpass even Apple's highest-end 15 -inch MacBook Pro, which is already a powerhouse. Like everything else about its upcoming iPhones, Apple doesn't say much about the chips that it plans to include, but as Cross notes, it takes many years to design chips and get production ramped up, so we've already heard leaks from suppliers like TSMC on some of the high-level specs that could be used for Apple's A14 SoC. 5nm Manufacturing and What It Means Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, is the supplier that produces all of Apple's A-series chips, and as Cross explains, Apple continues to benefit from improvements in TSMC's manufacturing processes that allow for more power to be packed into smaller spaces. The A12 and A13 chips were both built using a 7nm process, and while that was slightly enhanced for the A13 to provide faster speeds and better power efficiency, this year's A14 is expected to make the jump to a brand-new 5nm process, and could very well be the first chip of its kind to use it. This is a big upgrade. The 5nm mode is not a half-step by any stretch, but it is the next "full node" after 7nm. It uses extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography extensively throughout the process, and TSMC says it delivers 80 percent more logic density and can run either 15 percent faster at the same power as its 7nm chips, or 30 percent lower power at the same performance level. - Jason Cross, Macworld These processes represent how small the transistor circuits can be made on a given CPU design. Since modern CPUs are made up of billions of transistors, the smaller they can be made, the more you can pack in. More transistors equals greater performance, and in addition, smaller transistors require less power.