Apple Silicon will lead the way in 5nm chips this year

Counterpoint expects Apple to lead the way as the top customer in 5nm this year (with all orders to TSMC), including Apple Silicon fabrication for iPhones, iPads, (A14/A15) and the Mac’s continued transition to Apple Silicon (M1/M2).

Dale Gai for Counterpoint:

In 2020, the foundry industry revenue reached about $82 billion, representing a 23% YoY growth. Despite this high base of 2020, the double-digit growth will persist in 2021. We forecast a 12% YoY growth with a total revenue of $92 billion.

We expect TSMC, Taiwan’s leading foundry service company, to keep outperforming the industry by posting 13%-16% YoY sales growth in 2021.

TSMC started its 5nm mass production from Q1 2020, and Samsung followed after 6-9 months. 5nm is considered a fully adopted EUV node for both foundries as Intel’s equivalent 7nm announced another delay in production last year. Based on our estimates, the total wafer shipment volume of 5nm will account for 5% of 12-inch wafers in the global foundry industry in 2021, up from less than 1% in 2020. Apple is the top customer (with all orders to TSMC) in 5nm this year (see Exhibit 1), including both for iPhones (A14/A15) and the newly released Apple Silicon [Macs]. Qualcomm will be the second-largest 5nm customer as the iPhone 13 may adopt its X60 modem. TSMC is expected to book $10-billion revenue from 5nm in 2021. Samsung Foundry will also gain good traction from 5nm order wins, including its in-house (Exynos) SoC and Qualcomm. In our view, the capacity utilization rate will reach an average of 90% for TSMC and Samsung in 2021, with the upside from stronger flagship 5G smartphone models.

5-nanomater Wafer Shipment Breakdown by Customer, 2021

MacDailyNews Take: Apple leads. All others follow. As usual.

Also of interest, from our previous article, see these recent tweets from former Apple engineer Shac Ron:

The premise here is wrong. arm64 is the Apple ISA, it was designed to enable Apple’s microarchitecture plans. There’s a reason Apple’s first 64 bit core (Cyclone) was years ahead of everyone else, and it isn’t just caches. https://t.co/8wZxy8c9vr

— Shac Ron ₪ (@stuntpants) January 5, 2021

Apple planned to go super-wide with low clocks, highly OoO, highly speculative. They needed an ISA to enable that, which ARM provided.

M1 performance is not so because of the ARM ISA, the ARM ISA is so because of Apple core performance plans a decade ago.

— Shac Ron ₪ (@stuntpants) January 5, 2021

Apple is never going to ship another new Intel Mac. If you make Mac software and haven’t done an arm port yet, you are way behind.

— Shac Ron ₪ (@stuntpants) January 4, 2021