Report: Apple and TSMC plan to produce 3nm chips for Macs as soon as 2023, with as many as four dies and up to 40 CPU cores per chip
Apple is taking the PC world by storm with its first debut of Apple Silicon chips inside of Macs, taking what it learned from developing the iPhone and iPad … Source: The Information .
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple’s reported 3nm Mac roadmap extends its earlier move to sell Macs with internally designed processors based on the iPhone’s 5nm A14 architecture, documented in Apple’s initial in-house Mac-chip plan. Related coverage later placed both new Macs and the iPhone A16 on 5nm, making the reported 3nm transition a distinct next manufacturing step rather than an immediate replacement.
Subsequent reporting tied TSMC’s N3E process to Apple’s A17 and M3 chips, linking Mac silicon’s advance to a broader Apple 3nm roadmap across iPhone and Mac products.
First-order effects
- Apple gains a reported path to scale Mac processors beyond single-die designs, with as many as four dies and up to 40 CPU cores per chip.
- TSMC becomes the manufacturing partner for Apple’s proposed 3nm Mac transition, concentrating the plan’s execution on its process ramp.
Second-order effects
- Apple’s Mac and iPhone chip roadmaps become more tightly coupled around TSMC process availability, as later coverage associates 3nm with both M3 and A17 designs.
- The shift raises the importance of manufacturing-node timing in Apple’s Mac release planning; the intervening 5nm Mac roadmap shows that product generations can remain on an existing process while the next node matures.
Third-order effects
- If Apple continues moving Mac silicon through leading TSMC nodes, PC differentiation increasingly rests on vertically integrated chip design and access to advanced foundry capacity rather than CPU sourcing alone.
- The pattern points to compute becoming a product-planning constraint: architecture ambitions, such as multi-die designs, depend on the cadence and availability of a single manufacturing partner’s process technology.
The trend: Apple is extending its custom-silicon strategy from replacing merchant Mac CPUs to advancing performance tiers in step with TSMC’s leading process nodes.