The level of the world's first 3nm chip is disappointingApple has suffered significant criticism
Why is the chip manufacturing process constantly improving?Because the more advanced the chip process, the more transistors per unit area, the higher the performance, and the lower the energy consumption.
As a result, we see mobile phone chips go from 14 nanometers to 10 nanometers, then to 7 nanometers, 5 nanometers, and even 3 nanometers this year.
Many believe that 3nm will be a qualitative leap compared to previous 5nm (including 4nm) chips. The performance will be greatly improved and the power consumption will be greatly reduced.
After all, TSMC or Samsung have previously claimed that the performance of the 3nm process can be improved by about 20% compared with 5nm, and the power consumption is reduced by 25%-30% compared with 5nm.
Therefore, when the iPhone 15 was released, we all thought that the A17 it was equipped with would have at least 20% better performance than the A16 chip. And before any *** score, we can see that the A17 has a 31% improvement in single-core performance and a 26% increase in multi-core performance compared to the A16.
What about the actual situation?When the iPhone15 was officially released, it was really disappointing, because this A17 chip took the name of A17Pro in vain, but the performance was not Pro at all.
According to Apple, the CPU of the A17 is up to 10% higher than that of the A16, and look, this is the performance improvement brought by the 3nm chip, are you disappointed?
Looking at the GPU again, the previous A16 was a 5-core GPU, but this time it has become a 6-core GPU, and the number of cores has increased by 20%. As a result, Apple claims that GPU performance has improved by up to 20%.
That is to say, if the number of cores does not increase, it is still 5 cores, then the GPU performance remains the same, and now there are 20% more cores, then the performance is increased by 20%, which is equivalent to 3 nanometers and the previous generation of 5 nanometers (4 nanometers) is actually not much different at all.
However, Apple says that in terms of the A17AI, the performance is doubled. So the question is, is it possible that all the improvements have been put on AI, and the CPU and GPU Apple will not care about this time?Obviously, this is not possible.
So I think there is only one explanation, and that is the 3nm process, which is not as optimistic as it was before.
This question is very embarrassing for TSMC, because in order to cope with the 3nm process, TSMC has invested tens of billions of dollars in R&D and building factories. The same goes for Samsung, which has also spent tens of billions of dollars to enter the 3nm space.
At the same time, the ** of 3nm wafers is also more expensive than 5nm wafers, about 25% more expensive, and now 3nm is worse than 5nm (including 4nm), and the performance is worse than this small piece, so what do other chip manufacturers think?
At this level, how can others be willing to upgrade their 5nm chips to 3nm?After all, the performance has not improved, the cost has increased significantly, it is a pure waste of money, and whoever upgrades is very wrong.
Of course, some people say that TSMC will not carry the pot anymore, in fact, Apple squeezed the toothpaste too hard, and TSMC cannot be blamed, but in any case, the level of 3nm chips is actually very disappointing.