Apple Silicon chips will enter production later this year

By

Apple Silicon
Coming soon to a Mac near you.
Photo: Apple

Mass production on the 5-nanometer chips that will be used in the next-gen iPad Pro and the inaugural Apple Silicon Mac will supposedly kick off in the fourth quarter of 2020, Digitimes reported Wednesday.

According to the report, TSMC will be turning out around 5,000-6,000 Apple Silicon wafers per month. This is rumored to be the A14X chip, which is a more powerful version of the A14 expected with this year’s iPhone 12.

The report notes that:

“Apple’s growing adopting of SiP technology is setting a trend that many in the semiconductor sector are keen to follow. And leading backend services providers expect sales from their SiP businesses to climb about 30% in 2020.”

The transition to Apple Silicon

Apple unveiled its Apple Silicon transition at this year’s WWDC. At the time, Craig Federighi, SVP of Software Engineering, said that: “We expect to ship our first Mac with Apple Silicon by the end of this year. We expect the transition to take about two years.”

Apple has not given a precise timeframe for the launch of the first Apple Silicon Macs. The most recent iMac upgrade, made after WWDC and the Apple Silicon announcement, stuck with the same Intel architecture. There’s no word on when the first Apple Silicon iMacs will ship.

Reliable TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo previously suggested the first Apple Silicon-based MacBook Air could arrive in late 2020 or early 2021. He also predicted that the first MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon will arrive by the end of this year.

Are you excited about the possibility of Apple Silicon? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Source: Digitimes

Newsletters

Daily round-ups or a weekly refresher, straight from Cult of Mac to your inbox.

  • The Weekender

    The week's best Apple news, reviews and how-tos from Cult of Mac, every Saturday morning. Our readers say: "Thank you guys for always posting cool stuff" -- Vaughn Nevins. "Very informative" -- Kenly Xavier.