Thursday, March 12th 2020
TSMC to Kickstart 5 nm Volume Production in April, Production Capacity Already Fully Booked
TSMC will be doing good on their previous expectations for a H2 2020 ramp-up for high volume production (HVM) on their 5 nm manufacturing process. The new 5 nm fabrication process is an Extreme Ultraviolet lithography (EUV) one, with up to 14 layers being etchable onto the silicon wafers, as opposed to five and six, respectively, for TSMC's N7+ and N6 processes.
Volume production will start with Apple's A14 SoC, meant to be driving next-generation iPhones that should hit shelves by September this year (should the COVID-19 pandemic let it be so). Apple is using two thirds of TSMC's capacity for 5 nm as is with this SoC; it's currently unclear which client (or clients) are getting the leftover one third capacity. TSMC announced back in December that they were seeing yields upwards of 80% in 5 nm EUV fabrication, so now it's "just" a matter of monetizing the process until their 3 nm iteration comes online, expectedly, in 2022.
Sources:
DigiTimes, TSMC
Volume production will start with Apple's A14 SoC, meant to be driving next-generation iPhones that should hit shelves by September this year (should the COVID-19 pandemic let it be so). Apple is using two thirds of TSMC's capacity for 5 nm as is with this SoC; it's currently unclear which client (or clients) are getting the leftover one third capacity. TSMC announced back in December that they were seeing yields upwards of 80% in 5 nm EUV fabrication, so now it's "just" a matter of monetizing the process until their 3 nm iteration comes online, expectedly, in 2022.
20 Comments on TSMC to Kickstart 5 nm Volume Production in April, Production Capacity Already Fully Booked
Sr Mask Design Engineer => 5nm FinFet TSMC and Sec8 Samsung
Ampere is on Samsung's 8LPU and Hopper is on TSMC's 5FF.
www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/rumor-next-gen-nvidia-rtx-chip-will-be-based-on-samsung-10nm-node.264711/unread
AMD needs to pull forward Big Navi lineup and adjust its graphics cards portfolio accordingly so they will be at least somewhat competitive again.
So, what's up with Navi 21 and Navi 23 ?
Enthusiasts buy Super Navi and begin to recommend all other Radeons to the masses;
We have still quite a lot of performance on the table which we desperately need for our 4K, VR, high-Hz gaming, ray-tracing included.
Free advertisement for the whole lineup - ultimate performance leadership is all that matters.
Intel's Comet Lake will be out April/May time and with it's 5.3GHz and 10 cores it will mean Intel win a few benchmarks and the issues comes from if you give Intel an inch they will 'claim' a mile, if they have the best gaming CPU and the fastest at SuperPi and a few other obscure benchmarks then their marketing department will go to town on using only those benchmarks and the clueless buyers (which is probably 80%+ of the market) will fall for the marketing and buy Intel.
Zen 3 has such a large IPC gain that AMD has the ability to cut Intel off at the knees, they can finish them until Rocket/Alter Lake in 2H 2021 (still 14nm can you believe) so why would AMD not want to break the camel's back with Zen 3 as early as possible and really put some distance between them and Intel?
90% of people who were going to buy Zen 2 will have bought it by July and the rest will be waiting for Zen 3 whether it's released in July or December.
There is no downside for AMD to genuinely pull ahead of Intel rather than just trading blows with them and offering more cores or lower prices.
The reason I think AMD could release Zen 3 for the server market even earlier in maybe March/April is because that is where the big money is and I know a lot of server customers like to wait for 3 generations of a new architecture before buying so that any major issues / security flaws are fixed or at the very least known. So if Zen 3 is ready then why not? The design was finalised back in July last year so should be ready. Also AMD can split demand for Epyc over two nodes, 7nm and 7nm+ which will help manage capacity.
With Zen 3 AMD can really cement their superiority as the best CPU manufacturer for pretty much any usage case. They need to build this mindset before Intel regroups with Willow or Golden Cove.
Finally, my last reason it make sense for AMD to release Zen 3 sooner rather than later is that they have promised mobo manufacturers that Zen 4 will be released at the end of 2021,. Zen 4, as i'm sure you know, needs a whole new socket which mobo manufacturers love and they will demand AMD sticks to this 2021 time scale so with that in mind it just makes sense that if either Zen 2 or Zen 3 is going to have a shorter than normal life that it's Zen 2 and not Zen 3.
AMD only needs prices correction. Ryzen 9 3950X for $399 and Ryzen 9 3900X for $299 and Intel's entire lineup is DOA no matter what they do.
Sadly, even if AMD did this Intel would still sell reasonable numbers 'because it's Intel', there are quite a lot of people out there that would buy Intel because they have heard of Intel, they've not heard of AMD.
Also, Alter Lake and Rocket Lake are in coming around the end of this year and 1H of next year so AMD really can't sit still.
www.pcgamesn.com/amd/navi-4k-graphics-card
Nvidia’s flagship RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards are failing.
www.digitaltrends.com/computing/nvidia-rtx-2080-ti-founders-issues/