Apple may have commenced work on creating its 2nm platform, as suggested by leaked slides that have a lot to hide.
As of right now, only Apple’s iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max are commercially accessible smartphones with processors made with 3D printing technology. Reducing the size of a processor offers multiple benefits, such as enabling manufacturers to integrate more parts, resulting in an increased feature set and improved power efficiency. When it comes to running AAA games with high-end graphics, the iPhone 15 Pro models—which were released towards the end of last year—are capable of doing so more efficiently than Android smartphones that have 4nm Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs. It seems that Apple isn’t sitting back just yet, as a recent rumor suggests that it has started developing 2nm chip architectures.
According to a gamma0burst report, Apple has started working on the design of its upcoming 2nm SoCs. The document is a highly classified document with a ton of material suppressed. Although it’s unclear when or even which devices these are intended for, there’s a good chance these may appear in future iPhone models because the current generation of iPhones has the most power-efficient mobile chipsets on the market.
According to the most recent source, Apple will stick with a 3nm processor for the next iPhone 16 Pro and 16 Pro Max models, taking into account the release schedule from the previous year (perhaps dubbed the A18 and A18 Pro). Leaked benchmarks that show higher results than the current model have already been spotted. It is anticipated that the Apple iPhone 16 and 16 Pro series would launch in Q3 of this year. It’s likely that TSMC will begin producing 2nm chips by 2025, as per a prior Phone Arena report. This means that the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max may come with these new CPUs.
The current initiatives of Qualcomm are also clarified by the stolen documents. It discloses that Qualcomm is developing its extended reality (XR) and virtual reality (VR) SoCs on 3nm and 4nm platforms, which should give them an advantage against Apple’s Vision Pro and its M2 chips (5nm).
This does not, however, imply that Qualcomm will lag behind by a generation when Apple prepares its 2nm silicon. In order to determine a plan for its Snapdragon Gen 5 platform, Qualcomm is reportedly aggressively examining samples from TSMC and Samsung, according to an earlier report by Wccftech. With the upcoming Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 generation, Qualcomm is anticipated to strive for a 3nm technology, in contrast to the 4nm used in the current Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, which is present in devices such as the OnePlus 12.