Mass production of Apple Silicon's A14X processor to start in Q4 2020

AppleInsider

New reports from the supply chain claim that the Apple Silicon ARM processor A14X will enter mass production in the fourth quarter of the year.

Chip wafers [via Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Ltd.]

Ahead of its promised first Apple Silicon Mac, the A14X ARM processor that is said to power the MacBook and MacBook Pro -- plus the iPad Pro -- is said to be about to enter mass production. Processor manufacturer TSMC is to start making the chip in the fourth quarter.

According to Digitimes, TSMC is expected to be fabricating between 5,000 and 6,000 wafers per month, using its 5nm EUV process.. Each wafer contains several hundreds of the A14X processor, which will be broken up into separate chips later in the manufacturing process.

Citing unnamed sources, Digitimes, component suppliers believe that Apple's increasing adoption of its own System-in-Package (SIP) microprocessor technology is starting a trend for the industry. It claims that TSMC, plus others including ASE Technology, and IC substrate makers including Unimicron Technology, are gearing up for increased demand for the technology.

Recently, TSMC revealed potential performance and power-consumption improvements in Apple's A14 chipset. It has also reportedly been working on a 3-nanometer process that might be used for future Apple Silicon Macs.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the first Apple Silicon Macs will ship before the end of 2020.

Digitimes has a poor reputation for drawing conclusions about Apple products from its sources. It has a much stronger one for reports surrounding Apple's supply chain.

johanaziz

Oh damn. There goes my wishful thinking to order a new macbook on the 15th

entropys

I was sorta hoping The ASi SOC would be a different chip to the iPad’s.

humongous even. A power unconstrained monster in comparison.

revenant

is it possible to have two chips that run together and the OS sees and uses it as one chip? 

aderutter

I wouldn’t expect a Mac to have the same chip as an iPad due to the comments Apple have said about a family of SOCs for the new Macs.
I guess the MacBook Air would be okay with an A14X but I would expect the Macs to have more cores, especially the MacBook Pro rumoured for next weeks event. But having two A14X SOCs would be nice, and efficient from a manufacturing perspective
I don’t really want a MBP that is only performance equivalent to the current Intel MBP, I want something that is far ahead in more than just heat and battery.

robaba

I expect Apple Silicon for Mac to have a hypervisor on chip.  Also expect more robust gates and strands to handle higher power demands. I wouldn’t be surprised to see ASfM to be packaged as stacked dies with cache on a separate level from cpu/gpu and both sitting on a foundation of I/o and the Secure Vault.  In fact, why not separate cpu/hypervisor, gpu/nuralcore, cache, and io/Security to provide modularity with the entire line?  Perhaps I’m overthinking this...

blastdoor

entropys said:

I was sorta hoping The ASi SOC would be a different chip to the iPad’s.

humongous even. A power unconstrained monster in comparison.

The rumor is an 8 big core, 4 little core chip. Plus GPU. That’s not small! Or at least it wouldn’t be small on an intel process. Maybe on 5nm it’s medium sized.

i wonder if we’ll see a difference between Mac and iPad in clock speed. Perhaps also in RAM performance. 

zimmie

entropys said:

I was sorta hoping The ASi SOC would be a different chip to the iPad’s.

humongous even. A power unconstrained monster in comparison.

"A14X" here is probably a placeholder. There's little reason for an iPad and the entry-level Macs to use different processors, though. It just needs some PCIe lanes or an integrated Thunderbolt controller to be suitable for Macs. Make one chip, and just don't use the Thunderbolt on the iPads (or do use it instead of just USB 3 over USB-C).

revenant said:

is it possible to have two chips that run together and the OS sees and uses it as one chip? 

Sort of. Multiple cores on a single chip have a bus which connects them. This lets them share some data about what they are doing with the other cores on the same chip, so the OS knows which cores have available time for work. This bus can be extended out past the physical chip to let you use many separate chips. For example, the 2006-2012 Mac Pro models had sockets for two processors (yes, some of the 2009-2012 only had a single socket on their drawer, but the same motherboard could take a two-socket drawer).

What you can't do is connect two processors together and present them to the OS as a single, faster core. More processors means you can do more things at the same speed, not that you can do one thing faster. Fortunately, a lot of processor-intensive work can be split into chunks which can be worked in parallel.

aderutter said:

I wouldn’t expect a Mac to have the same chip as an iPad due to the comments Apple have said about a family of SOCs for the new Macs.
I guess the MacBook Air would be okay with an A14X but I would expect the Macs to have more cores, especially the MacBook Pro rumoured for next weeks event. But having two A14X SOCs would be nice, and efficient from a manufacturing perspective
I don’t really want a MBP that is only performance equivalent to the current Intel MBP, I want something that is far ahead in more than just heat and battery.

The A12X already keeps pace with current high-end laptop chips from Intel. A13 cores are faster and more efficient. A14 cores will be faster and more efficient still. With laptop cooling, I expect the laptop A14 to be able to perform extremely well for the bottom of Apple's range (MacBook Air, 2 TB3 MBP).

larryjw

I expected Apple Silicon will be more than a CPU chip -- not merely a marketing phrase. I wait until Apple Silicon is real. 

fastasleep

larryjw said:

I expected Apple Silicon will be more than a CPU chip -- not merely a marketing phrase. I wait until Apple Silicon is real. 

We already know it’s an SoC though. WWDC covered a lot of ground on what this all will mean for the Mac. Watch any of that by chance?

canukstorm

zimmie said:

entropys said:

I was sorta hoping The ASi SOC would be a different chip to the iPad’s.

humongous even. A power unconstrained monster in comparison.

"A14X" here is probably a placeholder. There's little reason for an iPad and the entry-level Macs to use different processors, though. It just needs some PCIe lanes or an integrated Thunderbolt controller to be suitable for Macs. Make one chip, and just don't use the Thunderbolt on the iPads (or do use it instead of just USB 3 over USB-C).

revenant said:

is it possible to have two chips that run together and the OS sees and uses it as one chip? 

Sort of. Multiple cores on a single chip have a bus which connects them. This lets them share some data about what they are doing with the other cores on the same chip, so the OS knows which cores have available time for work. This bus can be extended out past the physical chip to let you use many separate chips. For example, the 2006-2012 Mac Pro models had sockets for two processors (yes, some of the 2009-2012 only had a single socket on their drawer, but the same motherboard could take a two-socket drawer).

What you can't do is connect two processors together and present them to the OS as a single, faster core. More processors means you can do more things at the same speed, not that you can do one thing faster. Fortunately, a lot of processor-intensive work can be split into chunks which can be worked in parallel.

aderutter said:

I wouldn’t expect a Mac to have the same chip as an iPad due to the comments Apple have said about a family of SOCs for the new Macs.
I guess the MacBook Air would be okay with an A14X but I would expect the Macs to have more cores, especially the MacBook Pro rumoured for next weeks event. But having two A14X SOCs would be nice, and efficient from a manufacturing perspective
I don’t really want a MBP that is only performance equivalent to the current Intel MBP, I want something that is far ahead in more than just heat and battery.

The A12X already keeps pace with current high-end laptop chips from Intel. A13 cores are faster and more efficient. A14 cores will be faster and more efficient still. With laptop cooling, I expect the laptop A14 to be able to perform extremely well for the bottom of Apple's range (MacBook Air, 2 TB3 MBP).

I understand where you're coming from but during the WWDC keynote, it was stated that Apple was creating a family of SoC's specifically for the Macs

zimmie

canukstorm said:

zimmie said:

entropys said:

I was sorta hoping The ASi SOC would be a different chip to the iPad’s.

humongous even. A power unconstrained monster in comparison.

"A14X" here is probably a placeholder. There's little reason for an iPad and the entry-level Macs to use different processors, though. It just needs some PCIe lanes or an integrated Thunderbolt controller to be suitable for Macs. Make one chip, and just don't use the Thunderbolt on the iPads (or do use it instead of just USB 3 over USB-C).

revenant said:

is it possible to have two chips that run together and the OS sees and uses it as one chip? 

Sort of. Multiple cores on a single chip have a bus which connects them. This lets them share some data about what they are doing with the other cores on the same chip, so the OS knows which cores have available time for work. This bus can be extended out past the physical chip to let you use many separate chips. For example, the 2006-2012 Mac Pro models had sockets for two processors (yes, some of the 2009-2012 only had a single socket on their drawer, but the same motherboard could take a two-socket drawer).

What you can't do is connect two processors together and present them to the OS as a single, faster core. More processors means you can do more things at the same speed, not that you can do one thing faster. Fortunately, a lot of processor-intensive work can be split into chunks which can be worked in parallel.

aderutter said:

I wouldn’t expect a Mac to have the same chip as an iPad due to the comments Apple have said about a family of SOCs for the new Macs.
I guess the MacBook Air would be okay with an A14X but I would expect the Macs to have more cores, especially the MacBook Pro rumoured for next weeks event. But having two A14X SOCs would be nice, and efficient from a manufacturing perspective
I don’t really want a MBP that is only performance equivalent to the current Intel MBP, I want something that is far ahead in more than just heat and battery.

The A12X already keeps pace with current high-end laptop chips from Intel. A13 cores are faster and more efficient. A14 cores will be faster and more efficient still. With laptop cooling, I expect the laptop A14 to be able to perform extremely well for the bottom of Apple's range (MacBook Air, 2 TB3 MBP).

I understand where you're coming from but during the WWDC keynote, it was stated that Apple was creating a family of SoC's specifically for the Macs

Sure, but there’s no reason not to use a low-end Mac SoC in an iPad. The significant differences are the touch controller (currently external), cell modem (currently external), M coprocessor, the level of peripherals one would want (that is, PCIe lanes for Thunderbolt), and the power envelope. May as well make one part and shut off the stuff you don’t need. Chips stable at extremely high performance get binned as Mac parts, chips which fail the Mac test but which still work get binned as iPad parts and run a bit slower.

That would make the chip “specifically made for Macs”, but still usable in iPads.

Like how net neutrality said telcos couldn’t extort Netflix for more money under threat of deprioritization, so the telcos just slowed everything down and “let” companies pay for “fast lanes”. Technically fits within the promise.

Plus everything above the low end would definitely need a Mac-specific chip for a 15W+ power envelope.

JWSC

entropys said:

I was sorta hoping The ASi SOC would be a different chip to the iPad’s.

humongous even. A power unconstrained monster in comparison.

With no change to the SOC they could simply crank up the clock speed since power constraints aren’t as pressing.  But one would hope Apple would optimize the SOC for the Mac.  Unfortunately, I bought a new desktop iMac in the last year.  But I can’t wait to see what the ARM desktop version will be.  I might find myself making an excuse to buy again by giving my newish iMac to my son (It would be one hell of a Christmas present.)

mcdave

aderutter said:

I wouldn’t expect a Mac to have the same chip as an iPad due to the comments Apple have said about a family of SOCs for the new Macs.
I guess the MacBook Air would be okay with an A14X but I would expect the Macs to have more cores, especially the MacBook Pro rumoured for next weeks event. But having two A14X SOCs would be nice, and efficient from a manufacturing perspective
I don’t really want a MBP that is only performance equivalent to the current Intel MBP, I want something that is far ahead in more than just heat and battery.

The MacBook Air should be OK with an A14.  ASi trajectory has that thing outperforming the current mid-range 2.0GHz core-i5 in 13” MBP.

tht

mcdave said:

aderutter said:

I wouldn’t expect a Mac to have the same chip as an iPad due to the comments Apple have said about a family of SOCs for the new Macs.
I guess the MacBook Air would be okay with an A14X but I would expect the Macs to have more cores, especially the MacBook Pro rumoured for next weeks event. But having two A14X SOCs would be nice, and efficient from a manufacturing perspective
I don’t really want a MBP that is only performance equivalent to the current Intel MBP, I want something that is far ahead in more than just heat and battery.

The MacBook Air should be OK with an A14.  ASi trajectory has that thing outperforming the current mid-range 2.0GHz core-i5 in 13” MBP.

An A14 with 8 GB of RAM will be fine as the base version of most of the MBA, Mac mini, small iMac, or whatever lower end Mac. It would have about the same performance as the A12Z. The single core performance is going to be about 50% faster than the A12Z. Or in other words, faster in single core than any Mac or non-overclocked PC available. And, it has a shot at even outperforming most of those overclocked PCs in single core. GPU will be at about A12Z level, or Tiger Lake iGPU level. 2 of these performance cores, 4 efficiency cores, 8 GB of RAM, at about 10 W or lower? Sounds really good as a low end Mac.

FileMakerFeller

aderutter said:

I wouldn’t expect a Mac to have the same chip as an iPad due to the comments Apple have said about a family of SOCs for the new Macs.
I guess the MacBook Air would be okay with an A14X but I would expect the Macs to have more cores, especially the MacBook Pro rumoured for next weeks event. But having two A14X SOCs would be nice, and efficient from a manufacturing perspective
I don’t really want a MBP that is only performance equivalent to the current Intel MBP, I want something that is far ahead in more than just heat and battery.

There are many things Apple could do with the benefits of ASi across clock speed, heat management and battery life (and other factors). Apple's history has been to make something great out of the gate and steadily iterate to make it even better.

Part of that approach is knowing in advance what can already be achieved and what is likely to be achieved in the near term. I think that Apple will probably balance the trade-offs in each area to achieve about 85-90% of what is theoretically possible, to give themselves some headroom in reliability and future improvements.

As for the actual, real-world results... it could be anything from "meh" (which we will probably get from some sources regardless), through "raised eyebrows" to "jaw-dropping" and quite possibly even "stunning." And I don't know what will happen, but I'm really looking forward to a new laptop at some point in the next 12 months.