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The biggest reason to do this is because TSMC's N2 node and future nodes will be dominated by AI chips. Since AI chips have far bigger margins than most Apple c

The biggest reason to do this is because TSMC's N2 node and future nodes will be dominated by AI chips. Since AI chips have far bigger margins than most Apple chips, Apple will get outbid by companies like Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom. Nvidia already became TSMC's biggest customer last year. Every TSMC advanced node from N5 to N2 is fully booked and running at max capacity. It's not really realistic to make Mac, Watch, iPad chips on TSMC's best node in the next 3-4 years - assuming there is no collapse in AI. Unfortunately, this might mean we will get inferior Intel chips for our Macs. Intel nodes, as it stands, are far more power hungry, less dense, and lower yielding. Intel's own Panther Lake CPU tile is on 18A and it's extremely disappointing in terms of perf/watt and raw perf. I still expect iPhone chips to be made on the best TSMC nodes though. I'm assuming Apple will design every future core for both TSMC and Intel, sort of like how they dual sourced with TSMC and Samsung in the past for the same generation.

zitterbewegung 6mo ago
Apple arguably are making AI workstations that can do inference and training by their Mac Studio and Macbook Pros to a lesser extent. The M6 generation is going to be interesting and before the memory pricing going up their products were competitive to the rest of the industry. Intel is still working with small and smaller process nodes.
- aurareturn 6mo ago
  Yes, I want Apple to focus on Mac inference. It could be the return of laptops/desktops as a major revenue source for Apple. Macs have been ~10% of Apple's revenue for the last 10 years or so. I'd love to see Macs get up to 20-30%. I do expect personal AI machines to take off in a few years once local models and local hardware hit an inflection point. M5 Max is a major improvement for local inference due to the added matmul accelerators, but the RAM capacity and bandwidth bottleneck is huge. That said, enterprise AI chips will still take the cake in terms of margins.
  - bigyabai 6mo ago
    At any point in the last six years, Apple could have signed Nvidia's aarch64 BSD drivers and watched their revenue climb. It's a minuscule commitment that is fully supported by the higher-end Mac Pros, only disabled by software. That would have sent sales skyrocketing as far as the supply could handle it. But Apple is about B2C, and customers buy services. All of us know, deep down, that Apple Intelligence will be a subscription service offered as part of Apple One. The Mac won't become the magical backbone for your personal inference network, it's a product used to consume Apple Services first and everything else comes second.
LoganDark 6mo ago
I find it ironic that Apple did the whole silicon thing to get away from Intel and now they are reportedly crawling back to Intel? I hope M6 and beyond continue to be competitive for inference.
- SoKamil 6mo ago
  This is about FABs and not chip designs. Imagine a parallel universe where Apple was sourcing AMD chips (they actually did for graphic cards) and then went to TSMC to whom AMD is also a customer. Intel is both at the same time, AMD and TSMC.
  - LoganDark 6mo ago
    Note that I said M6 and beyond. I know the chip designs being produced will remain Apple's. Other commenters in the thread talk about how Intel's node is simply inferior to TSMC's and will bottleneck the performance of the same chip designs simply by being bad. I hope that is not the case and/or that I won't have to settle for an Intel node inside my Apple chips. (They better not try to pull an AMD where some chips simply have utterly kneecapped performance for no good reason.)
- lostlogin 6mo ago
  That’s unlikely to be how it’s working out for Intel. Apple aren’t going to be asking for Intel Inside. It’ll be more like ‘Can you make this thing? How many and much?’
GeekyBear 6mo ago
> TSMC's N2 node and future nodes will be dominated by AI chips. Apple was reported to have locked up half of the initial year's 2nm production, which is lower than their share of 3nm, but hardly a sign of being squeezed out of the market
- aurareturn 6mo ago
  But this was likely locked up years ago before this boom. Will Apple still be the premier customer for TSMC's next node A14? Apple was actually told by TSMC to move off of N3 asap because Nvidia with its Vera Rubin and Google TPUs will take over. Semianalysis had a great and detailed article about TSMC & Apple and how the future might play out: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/apple-tsmc-the-partnership-that-built https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/apple-tsmc-the-partner...
  - GeekyBear 6mo ago
    The reporting was from August of last year. https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/28/apple-tsmc-2nm-production-iphone-18/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/28/apple-tsmc-2nm-producti...
    - aurareturn 6mo ago
      It takes TSMC years to develop a new node. Apple has been the launch customer for a long time for TSMC. This agreement likely happened many years ago, before this AI boom. The Macrumors article definitely isn't when Apple decided to buy half of N2 capacity for the first year. It would have happened years ago.
brookst 6mo ago
Nvidia’s chips aren’t usually on the latest nodes. The M5 is in N3P, Blackwell is N4P. M6 is expected to be on an N2 node while Rubin is N3P. I don’t think Nvidia even has an N2 chip announced, could be wrong through.
- aurareturn 6mo ago
  Nvidia’s chips aren’t usually on the latest nodes. Not yet. The primary reason is because most AI chips are full reticle sized which means the first year yields likely won't be very cost effective. It takes a new node a few years to fully mature in terms of yield. Little iPhone A series and server CPU chiplets are perfect for new nodes. That said, Nvidia will certainly try to move smaller and lower volume chips in future generations to the most cutting edge node such as their CPUs, networking chips. Vera Rubin has 7 unique chips. They don't need be all on the same node, and they're not. AMD is taking up much of the N2 supply with their Epyc CPUs this year. There is no doubt in my mind that Nvidia, ARM, Graviton will try to book as much of the most cutting edge node as possible for their future enterprise CPUs given that AMD has done it for N2. I can see enterprise CPUs becoming equal launch partners to TSMC nodes as Apple. Agentic AI is going to cause a huge demand increase in CPUs.
  - brookst 6mo ago
    Agreed on all counts. Apple’s hedge with Intel makes a ton of sense, especially if they continue to pay a premium for first dibs on a significant chunk of TSMC’s newest nodes. So far Apple has been aggressive about stopping production of older processors, but as we see with MacBook Neo, even the lowest chips are increasingly overpowered for many users. I expect even if Intel can’t match TSMC’s latest, they’ll be able to produce one or two generations behind at low cost and high volume. (I worked at Intel for 5 years or so, that phrase would have gotten me fired back then)
    - aurareturn 6mo ago
      Going with Intel might mean higher cost. Intel has lower yields and making chips in the US is much costly than Taiwan. You can see this in TSMC Arizona chip costs vs Taiwan.
tobz1000 6mo ago
Panther Lake's efficiency doesn't match M5, but it seems to be very good by all accounts. "Extremely disappointing" is a misrepresentation.
- aurareturn 6mo ago
  Scroll to the "Cinebench 2024 Single Power Efficiency" section.[0] It doesn't even beat Lunar Lake in efficiency (made on TSMC N3B) released in 2024. [0]https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Panther-Lake-Core-Ultra-X9-388H-performance-analysis-Outpaces-Arrow-Lake-and-exceeds-Zen-5-in-efficiency.1212583.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Panther-Lake-Core-Ultra-...
  - williadc 6mo ago
    From the article you linked: > With the new Panther Lake mobile processors, Intel has managed to successfully combine the two previous generations, Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake, as the performance is even better than with Arrow Lake, while efficiency has been improved at the same time. Even with low power limits, the performance is very competitive, and Intel (in conjunction with the new GPUs) is therefore the better choice for slim laptops.
    - aurareturn 6mo ago
      Notice how it doesn't say it's more efficient than Lunar Lake. Their benchmarks say LNL is more efficient.
      - adrian_b 6mo ago
        The performance with LNL is not apples-to-apples, like the comparison with Arrow Lake H. LNL has a much lower power consumption in the memory interface, like the Apple CPUs, which has nothing to do with the fabrication process. Also LNL is a lower performance CPU, for which it is normal to have better energy efficiency. Only the comparison between Panther Lake and Arrow Lake H, which have equivalent structures, can be used to compare the Intel 18A and the TSMC 3-nm fabrication processes. This comparison shows that Intel 18A ensures a better performance per watt, i.e. energy efficiency, which leads to a better multithreaded performance, but the TSMC 3-nm process, at least for now, allows higher maximum clock frequencies, which make possible a higher single-thread performance.
adrian_b 6mo ago
I do not know on what data you base your sentence "Intel's own Panther Lake CPU tile is on 18A and it's extremely disappointing in terms of perf/watt and raw perf." Panther Lake does not have great raw performance, because for now Intel has not succeeded to obtain in their new 18A CMOS process clock frequencies as high as they get in the older TSMC 3-nm process used for their previous Arrow Lake H CPU generation and the CPU cores of Panther Lake have only minor changes that can affect performance in comparison with Arrow Lake/Lunar Lake. On the other hand, from the published reviews that I have seen, Panther Lake has significantly better performance per watt than Arrow Lake H, which can be attributed only to the Intel 18A process when compared with the TSMC 3 nm process. The energy efficiency i.e. performance per watt ratio of CPUs is mainly determined by the fabrication process and not by the CPU design, as long as the CPU designers are competent enough (unlike the single-thread performance, which is determined mainly by the CPU design). So there is no doubt that Apple CPUs made with the Intel 18A process will have better performance per watt than those made with a TSMC 3-nm process. Moreover, because Apple CPUs can reach a given level of performance at lower clock frequencies, they should be much less affected by the lower clock frequencies attainable with Intel 18A than the Intel CPUs. We also do not know whether Apple intends to use the Intel 18A process (currently used for Panther Lake laptop CPUs and Clearwater Forest server CPUs), or only its successor, Intel 14A.
- aurareturn 6mo ago
  All efficiency data can be found here: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Panther-Lake-Core-Ultra-X9-388H-performance-analysis-Outpaces-Arrow-Lake-and-exceeds-Zen-5-in-efficiency.1212583.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Panther-Lake-Core-Ultra-... The most important one for efficiency is ST perf/watt. MT perf/watt is largely based on how many cores there are. You can achieve better MT perf/watt simply by having more cores (more transistors) and run them at lower clocks. Panther Lake also has an entirely new MT config with 3 tiers of cores vs 2 for Arrow Lake. For ST perf/watt, it loses to LNL. Keep in mind that LNL and Arrow Lake used N3B, and future N3 nodes have been much more efficient. Panther Lake CPU is also a new design which should have improved perf/watt automatically regardless of node. Based on this, one can deduce that Intel 18A is likely a bit worse than N3B and perhaps equivalent to N4P. Keep in mind that N3B went into production in late 2022 and N4P was a 2021 node.
deleted 6mo ago
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zitterbewegung 6mo ago

Apple arguably are making AI workstations that can do inference and training by their Mac Studio and Macbook Pros to a lesser extent. The M6 generation is going to be interesting and before the memory pricing going up their products were competitive to the rest of the industry. Intel is still working with small and smaller process nodes.

aurareturn 6mo ago
Yes, I want Apple to focus on Mac inference. It could be the return of laptops/desktops as a major revenue source for Apple. Macs have been ~10% of Apple's revenue for the last 10 years or so. I'd love to see Macs get up to 20-30%. I do expect personal AI machines to take off in a few years once local models and local hardware hit an inflection point. M5 Max is a major improvement for local inference due to the added matmul accelerators, but the RAM capacity and bandwidth bottleneck is huge. That said, enterprise AI chips will still take the cake in terms of margins.
- bigyabai 6mo ago
  At any point in the last six years, Apple could have signed Nvidia's aarch64 BSD drivers and watched their revenue climb. It's a minuscule commitment that is fully supported by the higher-end Mac Pros, only disabled by software. That would have sent sales skyrocketing as far as the supply could handle it. But Apple is about B2C, and customers buy services. All of us know, deep down, that Apple Intelligence will be a subscription service offered as part of Apple One. The Mac won't become the magical backbone for your personal inference network, it's a product used to consume Apple Services first and everything else comes second.

LoganDark 6mo ago

I find it ironic that Apple did the whole silicon thing to get away from Intel and now they are reportedly crawling back to Intel? I hope M6 and beyond continue to be competitive for inference.

SoKamil 6mo ago
This is about FABs and not chip designs. Imagine a parallel universe where Apple was sourcing AMD chips (they actually did for graphic cards) and then went to TSMC to whom AMD is also a customer. Intel is both at the same time, AMD and TSMC.
- LoganDark 6mo ago
  Note that I said M6 and beyond. I know the chip designs being produced will remain Apple's. Other commenters in the thread talk about how Intel's node is simply inferior to TSMC's and will bottleneck the performance of the same chip designs simply by being bad. I hope that is not the case and/or that I won't have to settle for an Intel node inside my Apple chips. (They better not try to pull an AMD where some chips simply have utterly kneecapped performance for no good reason.)
lostlogin 6mo ago
That’s unlikely to be how it’s working out for Intel. Apple aren’t going to be asking for Intel Inside. It’ll be more like ‘Can you make this thing? How many and much?’

GeekyBear 6mo ago

> TSMC's N2 node and future nodes will be dominated by AI chips. Apple was reported to have locked up half of the initial year's 2nm production, which is lower than their share of 3nm, but hardly a sign of being squeezed out of the market

aurareturn 6mo ago
But this was likely locked up years ago before this boom. Will Apple still be the premier customer for TSMC's next node A14? Apple was actually told by TSMC to move off of N3 asap because Nvidia with its Vera Rubin and Google TPUs will take over. Semianalysis had a great and detailed article about TSMC & Apple and how the future might play out: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/apple-tsmc-the-partnership-that-built https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/apple-tsmc-the-partner...
- GeekyBear 6mo ago
  The reporting was from August of last year. https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/28/apple-tsmc-2nm-production-iphone-18/ https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/28/apple-tsmc-2nm-producti...
  - aurareturn 6mo ago
    It takes TSMC years to develop a new node. Apple has been the launch customer for a long time for TSMC. This agreement likely happened many years ago, before this AI boom. The Macrumors article definitely isn't when Apple decided to buy half of N2 capacity for the first year. It would have happened years ago.

brookst 6mo ago

Nvidia’s chips aren’t usually on the latest nodes. The M5 is in N3P, Blackwell is N4P. M6 is expected to be on an N2 node while Rubin is N3P. I don’t think Nvidia even has an N2 chip announced, could be wrong through.

aurareturn 6mo ago
Nvidia’s chips aren’t usually on the latest nodes. Not yet. The primary reason is because most AI chips are full reticle sized which means the first year yields likely won't be very cost effective. It takes a new node a few years to fully mature in terms of yield. Little iPhone A series and server CPU chiplets are perfect for new nodes. That said, Nvidia will certainly try to move smaller and lower volume chips in future generations to the most cutting edge node such as their CPUs, networking chips. Vera Rubin has 7 unique chips. They don't need be all on the same node, and they're not. AMD is taking up much of the N2 supply with their Epyc CPUs this year. There is no doubt in my mind that Nvidia, ARM, Graviton will try to book as much of the most cutting edge node as possible for their future enterprise CPUs given that AMD has done it for N2. I can see enterprise CPUs becoming equal launch partners to TSMC nodes as Apple. Agentic AI is going to cause a huge demand increase in CPUs.
- brookst 6mo ago
  Agreed on all counts. Apple’s hedge with Intel makes a ton of sense, especially if they continue to pay a premium for first dibs on a significant chunk of TSMC’s newest nodes. So far Apple has been aggressive about stopping production of older processors, but as we see with MacBook Neo, even the lowest chips are increasingly overpowered for many users. I expect even if Intel can’t match TSMC’s latest, they’ll be able to produce one or two generations behind at low cost and high volume. (I worked at Intel for 5 years or so, that phrase would have gotten me fired back then)
  - aurareturn 6mo ago
    Going with Intel might mean higher cost. Intel has lower yields and making chips in the US is much costly than Taiwan. You can see this in TSMC Arizona chip costs vs Taiwan.

tobz1000 6mo ago

Panther Lake's efficiency doesn't match M5, but it seems to be very good by all accounts. "Extremely disappointing" is a misrepresentation.

aurareturn 6mo ago
Scroll to the "Cinebench 2024 Single Power Efficiency" section.[0] It doesn't even beat Lunar Lake in efficiency (made on TSMC N3B) released in 2024. [0]https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Panther-Lake-Core-Ultra-X9-388H-performance-analysis-Outpaces-Arrow-Lake-and-exceeds-Zen-5-in-efficiency.1212583.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Panther-Lake-Core-Ultra-...
- williadc 6mo ago
  From the article you linked: > With the new Panther Lake mobile processors, Intel has managed to successfully combine the two previous generations, Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake, as the performance is even better than with Arrow Lake, while efficiency has been improved at the same time. Even with low power limits, the performance is very competitive, and Intel (in conjunction with the new GPUs) is therefore the better choice for slim laptops.
  - aurareturn 6mo ago
    Notice how it doesn't say it's more efficient than Lunar Lake. Their benchmarks say LNL is more efficient.
    - adrian_b 6mo ago
      The performance with LNL is not apples-to-apples, like the comparison with Arrow Lake H. LNL has a much lower power consumption in the memory interface, like the Apple CPUs, which has nothing to do with the fabrication process. Also LNL is a lower performance CPU, for which it is normal to have better energy efficiency. Only the comparison between Panther Lake and Arrow Lake H, which have equivalent structures, can be used to compare the Intel 18A and the TSMC 3-nm fabrication processes. This comparison shows that Intel 18A ensures a better performance per watt, i.e. energy efficiency, which leads to a better multithreaded performance, but the TSMC 3-nm process, at least for now, allows higher maximum clock frequencies, which make possible a higher single-thread performance.

adrian_b 6mo ago

I do not know on what data you base your sentence "Intel's own Panther Lake CPU tile is on 18A and it's extremely disappointing in terms of perf/watt and raw perf." Panther Lake does not have great raw performance, because for now Intel has not succeeded to obtain in their new 18A CMOS process clock frequencies as high as they get in the older TSMC 3-nm process used for their previous Arrow Lake H CPU generation and the CPU cores of Panther Lake have only minor changes that can affect performance in comparison with Arrow Lake/Lunar Lake. On the other hand, from the published reviews that I have seen, Panther Lake has significantly better performance per watt than Arrow Lake H, which can be attributed only to the Intel 18A process when compared with the TSMC 3 nm process. The energy efficiency i.e. performance per watt ratio of CPUs is mainly determined by the fabrication process and not by the CPU design, as long as the CPU designers are competent enough (unlike the single-thread performance, which is determined mainly by the CPU design). So there is no doubt that Apple CPUs made with the Intel 18A process will have better performance per watt than those made with a TSMC 3-nm process. Moreover, because Apple CPUs can reach a given level of performance at lower clock frequencies, they should be much less affected by the lower clock frequencies attainable with Intel 18A than the Intel CPUs. We also do not know whether Apple intends to use the Intel 18A process (currently used for Panther Lake laptop CPUs and Clearwater Forest server CPUs), or only its successor, Intel 14A.

aurareturn 6mo ago
All efficiency data can be found here: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Panther-Lake-Core-Ultra-X9-388H-performance-analysis-Outpaces-Arrow-Lake-and-exceeds-Zen-5-in-efficiency.1212583.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Panther-Lake-Core-Ultra-... The most important one for efficiency is ST perf/watt. MT perf/watt is largely based on how many cores there are. You can achieve better MT perf/watt simply by having more cores (more transistors) and run them at lower clocks. Panther Lake also has an entirely new MT config with 3 tiers of cores vs 2 for Arrow Lake. For ST perf/watt, it loses to LNL. Keep in mind that LNL and Arrow Lake used N3B, and future N3 nodes have been much more efficient. Panther Lake CPU is also a new design which should have improved perf/watt automatically regardless of node. Based on this, one can deduce that Intel 18A is likely a bit worse than N3B and perhaps equivalent to N4P. Keep in mind that N3B went into production in late 2022 and N4P was a 2021 node.

deleted 6mo ago

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