TSMC Said to Begin Exclusive Production of A10 Chip for iPhone 7 in March 2016

I'm wondering where Apple has left to go at this point.

We'd been waiting for a bigger screen for a long time. We'd been waiting for NFC for a long time. We waited for Force Touch.

I guess they can do that edge-to-edge screen with no home button that we've been waiting for, but that seems like a gimick, not an actually useful feature.

I guess Apple could make it so that you can actually feel stuff on the screen. Like, Haptic feedback as opposed to Taptic feedback. Or some actual 3D features. Do we think Apple is going to have features like that ready for mass production within a year?

We didn't really 'wait' for ForceTouch. That was brand new with the AppleWatch, and only released in a final state in what? March?

Edge to edge LCD brings durability problems. I honestly don't bet on this one.

Waterproof or water resistant with sealed electronic modules like the AppleWatch. This likely involves ditching the mechanical home button for a capacitive button.

Some of these thing could come around next year with the new industrial design.

Embedding TouchID in the LCD. They have a patent on this, remains to be seen if it's practical. I have my doubts. Seems a little too science fiction.

An overhaul of iOS at version 10... iOSX? lol. For a more black based UI, and switching to AMOLED displays like on the AppleWatch for more energy efficiency.

iPhone 7 likely started development 2 years ago. iPhones probably have a 3 year development cycle. They are highly technologically advanced. They more than likely have engineering teams leap frogging each other. So it's not a matter of can they do x in the next year. They've likely been working on whatever they want in it, for the last year... or 2!

Excellent. Looking forward to getting my iPhone 7 :)

Let's hope they can fix everything that's wrong with the 6S :P

Better be alpha-tri-octa-core with 12GB of RAM!! :mad:

;)

It's gonna have so much RAM that it keeps every tab you have ever opened in cache, even ones you opened on previous iPhones.

This is the phone I'm waiting for!

Can't wait for some tests of the A9 vs the A8. The A9 is also supposedly on a 16nm node. Mobile chips are getting so powerful it's a little bit insane.

Can't wait for the A10 to blow them all away!

Excellent. Looking forward to getting my iPhone 7 :)

Let's hope they can fix everything that's wrong with the 6S :p

like what? the 6S is the fixed version. iphone 7 will bring new problems they can fix with the 7S :p

And the base model will still ship with 16 GB of storage.

I hope that with the 7, they clean up the lineup... I'd love to not see a 5S / 6 / 6S for sale anymore. Just make a series of iPhone 7 devices. Mini (5s screen size), regular, and Plus.

Can't wait for some tests of the A9 vs the A8. The A9 is also supposedly on a 16nm node. Mobile chips are getting so powerful it's a little bit insane.

Better be alpha-tri-octa-core with 12GB of RAM!! :mad:

;)

I'm wondering where Apple has left to go at this point.
...

In terms of the A9/M9 and their relation to the overall system there are gaps an A10 could fill:

1. Battery life didn't get better with iPhone 6s over what are specs of iPhone 6. The A9 is better but some battery space has to be traded for the much bigger Tapic Engine so the time on battery is a wash. More 16nm optimizations (plus other internals updates ) may squeeze out more time on now smaller battery. The "squeeze" may be even bigger if rumors of trying to track iPod Touch thinness. Again loosing battery volume, but would need to at least tread water on usable time.

2. Local Siri .... at some point perhaps Siri gets smart enough locally to do some straight forward local commands with local resources. That would soak up a decent amount of computational horsepower.


3. Just like M9 moved into the "CPU" package this time there is probably something else coming off what is left of the motherboard. One iteration closer to System on a 'Chip' ( SoC ).


4. The camera module has probably changed if much thinner. Probably will need new pixel/camera processing hardware to deal with the trade-offs.


5. 4K video out ( 1080p now. can't output the camera can record at full resolution). Similarly either H.265/HEVC or broader range of those higher compression codecs in hardware. HDR Video.

6. 2nd gen asynchronous execution support in the GPGPUs.