We guess only a few of our readers know that there has been a design defect in the Apple A16 Bionic chip. This is one of the reasons why the Cupertino-based company has begun working on a new chip so soon. The Apple A17 is in the works.
According to the analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the slowdown of processor upgrades is not conducive to the sales of terminal products (such as A16 and M2 series chips). That’s why Apple is putting most of its IC design resources into the development of new processors.
Ming-Chi Kuo said that in the foreseeable future, Apple would devote most of its design resources to the Apple Silicon chip manufactured by the 3nm process. The latter ought to bring a significant improvement in performance and help the devices consume less power.
This is the next priority for the Apple team. However, due to insufficient development resources, Apple has even postponed the development and mass production of its own 5G baseband and Wi-Fi chips.
If all goes according to plan, Ming-Chi Kuo expects that “the world’s most advanced 3nm processor” designed by Apple will enter mass production as soon as this year.
After upgrading to 3nm, the performance of Apple Silicon chips will be greatly improved. This refers to the Apple A17 series that is going to be used in the iPhone 15 and the new M-series chips used in the Mac.
Prior to this, we heard that Apple originally planned to make a major upgrade to the GPU of the A16 chip on the iPhone 14 Pro series. Unfortunately, the company discovered an “unprecedented” mistake. So the company has had to cancel the new GPU plan in the later stage of development.
The A16’s new generation GPU is “too ambitious” and was originally going to add functions such as ray tracing. However, due to design flaws, it consumes much more power than expected. In other words, it directly affects the battery life and thermal management of the iPhone 14 Pro.
Apple only discovered the design flaws of the new GPU in the later stage of development and had to rush to use the A15 GPU.