It’s another slow news Friday, so why not liven things up with a fresh, heapin’ helpin’ of rumors, courtesy of DigiTimes. We still have five or six months to go until we’ll see the rumored iPhone 7, but DigiTimes isn’t going to wait for that — they’re jumping ahead to the 2017 iPhone 7s model, which they say will be outfitted with an “A11” chip to be manufactured by TSMC.
The chip design is allegedly based on a 10-nanometer FinFET process that TSMC is working on and that won’t even be certified until late 2016. iPhones at this time use 14 or 16 nanometer chip designs depending on the source — Samsung or TSMC — and shrinking the size provides better power efficiency for the phone. Research into 7-nanometer designs continues, and a 2018 or 2019 debut would be a possibility depending on progress made by suppliers.
DigiTimes’ sources say that TSMC would get about two-thirds of all A11 orders, and it’s assumed that Samsung would provide the other third of the chips since there are so few companies that can mass-produce the quantities required.
We now return you to reality, dull as it may be…
