According to Taiwan's "Business Times" report, TSMC's slightly improved 2nm N2P process will be the first to be adopted by Qualcomm and MediaTek this year. The two companies hope to use this to seize the technical advantage over Apple in new products later this year. However, sources say that Apple is expected to introduce the N2P process into next year's A21 Pro chip to maintain competitiveness with flagship chips in the Android camp. However, this advanced process will only be used on the Pro version, and the standard version of the A21 will still stay at the earlier 2nm N2 node.
The A21 standard version for the basic iPhone 20 is expected to continue to use TSMC’s 2nm N2 process, which is also believed to be used in the previous generation of A20 and A20 Pro, thus diluting development and production costs to a certain extent. In the context of rising wafer costs, tight memory supply and high prices, Apple, even as a technology giant with a market capitalization of trillions of dollars, has to make choices in the pace of high-end process introduction to avoid further erosion of profit margins.
From a performance perspective, there is no "generational leap" between N2 and N2P. The report quoted industry information as saying that at the same frequency, the performance improvement of N2P compared to N2 is only about 5%, and it will not immediately open up a huge gap in terminal experience. In addition, Apple has accumulated a lot of experience in chip architecture design. Even if it uses the N2 process, it can make up for some of the process gaps through architecture optimization and energy efficiency adjustment, without having to rely entirely on the most advanced photolithography process in exchange for performance.
Taking the A19 Pro as an example, after the architecture is optimized, the four energy-efficiency cores on the chip can achieve a performance improvement of up to about 29% under the premise of "zero additional power consumption", showing Apple's ability to deeply tap the potential at the micro-architecture level. It can be speculated that it is entirely possible for Apple to use similar architectural improvements on the A21 standard version to control the impact of not upgrading the process within a relatively acceptable range.
On the other hand, in order to maintain its voice in the high-end market, Apple still has the motivation to migrate the A21 Pro to the N2P process to compete head-on with Qualcomm and MediaTek's flagship chips using the same process in terms of core count, frequency and energy efficiency ratio. As time goes by and the maturity of the N2P mass production process increases, TSMC's wafer costs are expected to gradually fall, which will also alleviate Apple's cost pressure on high-end processes to a certain extent.
Apple plans to introduce the A22 Pro to TSMC’s 1.4nm process in 2028. This will be the first time Apple has entered the sub-2nm era. However, there is currently no clue whether the standard version of the A22 will be upgraded simultaneously, and the A21 series has not been included in this planning discussion. From the roadmap from A21 to A22, it can be seen that Apple seems to be prioritizing the introduction of the latest process on the flagship Pro chip, and then depending on the cost and market feedback to decide whether to transfer it to the standard model.
It should be pointed out that the accuracy record of the "Business Times" in relevant revelations is not always perfect, so the news itself is still uncertain, and the subsequent direction needs to be confirmed by more channels. The report itself also emphasizes that readers should have reservations about this series of rumors about the A21 and A22 process planning, and wait for further news from the follow-up industry chain and Apple officials.