It is a well known fact that Apple starts working on its plans a few years in advance. On similar lines, references to A19 and M5 chips have been spotted recently in Apple’s official code. This suggests that the tech giant has started working on these chips already.
An X (formerly Twitter) user who goes by the username @_orangera1n has posted a tweet showing a code snippet that mentions the upcoming A19 and M5 chip in Apple’s internally used codenames.
It appears that apple has started work on the A19 and M5 Pro/Max/Ultra SOCs
— Ellie 🔥🌸 #DownWithRose #MollySupport #MizuSuprt (@_orangera1n) August 20, 2023
Also I wonder what 0x6033/0x6034 are pic.twitter.com/C8f5vcrlFv
She accompanied the tweet with the following caption: “It appears that Apple has started work on the A19 and M5 Pro/Max/Ultra SOCs
Also I wonder what 0x6033/0x6034 are”
To discover unreleased ApChipIDs, TSS was requested to output all possible chip identifiers. The result without an invalid identifier could possibly point to an unreleased chip.
The integers shown in the tweeted image is the CHIP tag, which is a 16-bit unsigned integer that denotes the type of chip the firmware is to be installed to. The CHIP tag is hardcoded in the boot chain instead of being read from the fuses.
For example, the currently used chip A16 Bionic has “0x8120” as its CHIP tag. Following the naming conventions of CHIP tags, it is believed that 0x8150 refers to the A19 chip. Whereas, 0x6050, 0x6051, and 0x6052 denote M5 Pro, M5 Max, and M5 Ultra chips respectively.
The output from Tatsu Signing Server does not reveal any substantial information other than the fact that Apple has already started working on these chipsets internally.
As Apple is expected to announce new iPhones in a matter of few weeks, the upcoming iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max is touted to arrive with the A17 Bionic chip based on the 3-nm architecture. Similarly, if Apple releases an iPhone every year, which it does religiously, we could see the A19 chip in 2025’s iPhone 17 Pro models.