Next week Apple will release iPhone XS and budget 6.1-inch LCD iPhone, and they will have a key advantage over flagships Android. The company will release the first smartphone with a 7nm processor.
The A12 processor will be based on the 7nm TSMC process and should be super powerful. The company Huawei has already presented its 7nm Kirin 980 processor, but a smartphone with it (Mate 20) will only be presented in October. By this time iPhone XS will already be on sale.
Other chip manufacturers are not yet ready to move to the 7nm process due to the high costs. TSMC has spent billions of dollars to develop a 7nm process. The very manufacture of such processors will also cost millions of dollars. For example, Huawei spent $ 300 million developing the Kirin 980 processor. Many companies simply cannot afford this technology.
Instead of developing 7nm processors, Qualcomm and MediaTek have continued to improve their best-selling processors with new 12nm and 14nm variants. These companies are paying more attention to the 10nm and 12nm processors they sell because they see more potential in this.
Apart from TSMC, Samsung is the only company to develop a 7nm process. It plans to create a next-generation Exynos processor for the Galaxy S10.
Due to the inaction of other companies, Apple will have an advantage over them for at least six months. Although Huawei presents the Kirin 980 processor, its characteristics can only be compared with the A11 Bionic processor, which was released in 2017. As for the iPhone XS, its A12 processor should be 23-30% faster than before.