I don't think they have the fab capacity to be able to do that.
Since M1 products are selling very well, they likely have reallocated fab capacity they had planned for the successor to the M1 back to making the M1.
A higher performance M1 would have a bigger die size. It would have a lower yield and get fewer dies per wafer. The same capacity would sell fewer products.
Apple probably earns more profits by simply selling more M1s, unless they can reserve substantially more fab capacity.
Some benchmark sites claim they saw performance reports. Whether they make those up to see more traffic, I cannot tell. If I worked at Apple, I would not tell :)
> I don't think they have the fab capacity to be able to do that
Do you have a source for there being any fab capacity shortage for Apple (or anyone, for that matter) at 5nm? Older nodes are a different story because that's still where most of TSMC's customers are doing their high-volume production.
I think plenty of people will skip it. Even ignoring the high cost, not everything scales as well with every new node. There're plenty of customers who will have no interest in this node right now and some that will have no interest in it ever. I've not seen anything that suggests capacity shortages at 5nm yet, especially for Apple who've already booked all of 3nm for next-gen.
SRAM scaling from 7nm to 5nm is pitiful. While the CPU transistors see 50-70% increases, the SRAM is only shrinking 20-30%.
For chips with massive cache, that isn’t super cost effective (I suspect as a cost saving measure that we’ll see L2/L3 cache moving to a separate chip on a larger process while the rest shrinks down).
Since M1 products are selling very well, they likely have reallocated fab capacity they had planned for the successor to the M1 back to making the M1.
A higher performance M1 would have a bigger die size. It would have a lower yield and get fewer dies per wafer. The same capacity would sell fewer products.
Apple probably earns more profits by simply selling more M1s, unless they can reserve substantially more fab capacity.