It appears Apple may be prepping for some high-grade upgrading when it comes to smartwatches. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman claims Apple’s upcoming Watch Series 9 models, along with the next Apple Ultra, are “due for the updated SoC.”
The same chipset was imbedded inside the current-gen Apple Watch Series 8 and Apple Watch Ultra as the Series 7 and Series 6. It confirmed after the same processor identifier was spotted for the S8 chip as older generations.
The S6, S7, and S8 are all based on the A13 Bionic introduced by Apple with the iPhone 11 series. The TSMC’s 7nm process indicates this smartwatch chip carrying the T8301 identifier was emitting a 20% performance boost.
It has been confirmed that the next-gen S9 chip will be “a new processor and not just a re-brand of the previous generation.”
It has been hinted at that the S9 chip will end up modeled after the A15 Bionic, based on the 5nm fabrication process, which is the same processor that was used with the entire iPhone 13 series and the non-Pro iPhone 14 models.
