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 plan to move Macs onto internally designed processors based on iPhone-derived chip development. It also puts Apple and TSMC’s manufacturing plans at the center of how far Apple Silicon can scale beyond its initial Mac designs.
Later coverage tied TSMC’s N3E process to both Apple’s A17 iPhone chip and M3 Mac chips, making the Mac plan part of a broader effort to carry a leading process node across Apple’s product lines.
First-order effects
- Apple gains a planned path to substantially larger Mac processors—up to four dies and 40 CPU cores—while TSMC becomes the production partner for that next node transition.
- Apple’s Mac chip roadmap moves beyond the earlier 5nm-based processor effort, giving its in-house silicon program a defined route to higher-end Mac configurations.
Second-order effects
- Using the same advanced-node family across Macs and iPhones makes Apple’s product teams more dependent on TSMC’s process readiness and production allocation; later reporting explicitly connected N3E to A17 and M3 chip plans.
- The proposed multi-die Mac design shifts the competitive comparison from individual CPU cores toward how effectively Apple can combine multiple dies in a single Mac chip.
Third-order effects
- If Apple continues moving Mac and iPhone chips through successive TSMC nodes, the company’s product differentiation increasingly rests on control of chip architecture and access to leading manufacturing processes rather than on third-party PC processors.
- The pattern points to advanced semiconductor capacity becoming a product-planning constraint for device makers that design their own chips, not merely a component-sourcing decision.
The trend: Apple Silicon is turning leading-edge foundry access into a shared strategic foundation for both Mac performance scaling and iPhone chip roadmaps.