Apple iPhone 8 Will Have Snapdragon 835 Like Chip, Similar To iPad Pro

Apple’s new iPad Pro tablets launched at the company’s World Wide Developers Conference, containing the company’s new chipset – the A10X. At the launch, Apple stated that A10X’s performance would be 30-40 percent better than that of its predecessor the A9X.

A new teardown of the Apple iPad Pro has found the reason being it — the A10X is based on the 10nm processor technology, same as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor used in the Samsung Galaxy S8.

Read: Apple’s A11 Processor For iPhone 8, 7s, 7s Plus And iPad Refreshes Enter Production

Techinsights, a website specializing in product teardowns, delved into the chipset and found that the processor used in the iPad Pro was entirely different than the A10 and A9X processors. — it is based on 10nm processor technology.

Simply put, 10nm technology is a new processor technology, which lets chipset makers accommodate more transmitters on a chipsets, in a much smaller surface area than the previous 14nm and 16nm chipsets. This leads to more performance efficiency and better power usage.

“We expected the Samsung 10 nm LPE process, TSMC 10 FF process, and Intel’s 10 nm process in production this year. Samsung’s came in first with the release of the Samsung Galaxy S8, containing either a Samsung or Qualcomm designed APU, built on Samsung’s 10 nm LPE process. The march continues with the Apple A10X, which is confirmed to be built on TSMC’s 10 FF process. The A10X die size comes in at 96.4 mm2 as compared to the previous generation, A9X at 143.9 mm2, which was built on TSMC’s 16 FF-Turbo technology,” an article on the website titled “ 10 nm Process Rollout Marching Right Along” published Thursday explained that the new processor was actually much smaller in surface area than the previous ones.

TSMC, the company that makes Apple chipsets; Samsung and Intel were all rumored to be working on 10nm processors at the start of the year, but Samsung and Qualcomm were the first to reveal their 10nm processors based on proprietary Samsung FinFET technology. Since Qualcomm sued was counter sued by Apple, it seemed that the company might not get its hands on the technology. But, as the teardown revealed, Apple has its own 10nm processors in the works, which means that even its upcoming and highly awaited device, the iPhone 8 will also have a 10nm processor.

This is also in line with a previous Digitimes report, published in November, which stated that it was making 10nm processors for the Apple iPhone 8.

This will definitely be a welcome relief for many Apple loyalists as a 10nm processor will put Apple’s device at par with the Samsung Galaxy S8. Not only that, the two devices are expected to share another key feature — the Samsung Galaxy S8 has an edge-to-edge display that it calls the Infinity Display and the iPhone 8 is expected to have one too.

Read: iPhone 8 News: Samsung Building World's Biggest OLED Production Facility For Apple Display Orders

It is noteworthy that Samsung subsidiary Samsung Display will be the one manufacturing the displays and has already made a large investment in setting up the “world’s biggest plant” for the purpose.