Apple has certainly hit the nail on the head by choosing TSMC as a manufacturer of its processors. Its high specialization is giving new increasingly efficient chips, with very advanced technologies.
It is already manufacturing the A15 of the iPhone 13 with a 5nm architecture, but the next chips for Apple devices will already be 4nm, and the 3nm ones are already in the testing phase. One last.
A report you just published Nikkei, ensures that both TSMC and Intel are prepared to manufacture processors with technology of 3 nm. This means that they will be much more efficient chips than the current ones, 5 nm.
Said article explains that Apple's first 3nm chip will likely arrive in an iPad (presumably a Pro model). The iPhone 14 will use a larger 4nm SoC due to programming throughput rates / lead times. This would still be an improvement over the 5nm chip design seen in the iPhone 12 and which will continue to mount in the iPhone 13 this year.
The famous nanometers (nm) is the distance between transistors on a chip. When the size of the process decreases, the gaps between transistors are reduced. This generally results in a more energy efficient and higher performance design.
For iPhones launching this year, they will mount an Apple A15 chip built in a size of 5 nm which are already in the mass production phase, to be able to launch them in September of this year.
Two years from now, Apple will adopt processors from 3 nm for all your devices, spanning iPhones, iPads and Macs. The logical thing to do is to start with the iPad Pro first, from a logistical perspective. It will be a new version of the current Apple M1. Who knows if the M2, or already a new M3 ...
