For the past few iPhone and iPad generations, TSMC has been pretty much the exclusive manufacturer of Apple’s A-series chips. Before that TSMC and Samsung shared production orders, and even earlier than that Samsung held the exclusivity, although the lawsuit with Apple and also TSMC’s advancement in the manufacturing process eventually edged them out.
Now there have been reports claiming that Samsung is trying to win back orders for 2019’s A13 chipsets, but if a report from DigiTimes is to be believed, that might no longer be happening. According to the report, it appears that TSMC could continue to remain the exclusive manufacturer for the A13 chipset, and that by doing so it could see TSMC secure more than 60% of the pure-play foundry market.
At the moment it is unclear as to what we might be able to expect from the A13 chipset. We do expect that it will be manufactured using the 7nm process as with the A12 Bionic, but whether or not we will see Apple bump the number of cores is unclear. Right now the A12 Bionic is a hexa-core chipset which according to benchmarks, has shown to be catching up to desktop levels of performance.
Either way it’s probably too early to tell what we can expect from the A13, so take it with a grain of salt for now.