TSMC 5nm. Competition?

The technology gap between TSMC and every other foundry across world is widening at an increased rate. If it goes like this this might not only kill Intel but all competition across world. There are a few companies that come close in technology (like Samsung) but none of them are even close to the volume/capacity of TSMC.

1 Like

The N5P technology provides roughly 20% speed improvement or about 40% reduction in power consumption compared with the 7nm

Very nice, very nice.

and Apple already bought 100% of their capacity.

the thing is that basically nobody besides Apple has access to their chips, so other companies still have space to provide all other chip buyers.

but yes, nobody is close to TSMC, they are doing a amazing job and Apple has a big part on this.

This isn’t completely correct.
Rumor sais Apple reseved 100% of TSMC’s 5nm till the end of the year. So a format that was available for a certain period, not all formats and probably not accounting growth.

Tsmc has quite a few current procédé in production 14nm, 10nm, 7nm in different variants.

Even if Apple would let tsmc produce every single chip they use in all their devices tsmc would have capacity for others, albeit in different procédé.

I couldn’t find the article but I can recall that Apple has done this before but the demand for that years iPhone model was lower than expected and Apple had trouble using the available fabrication.

Currently Samsung is on the same nm scale as tsmc, Intel is behind and delayed but will undoubtedly catch up but is only producing for own consumption.

There are other manufacturers but they don’t have the same nm scale nor the quantity but they could still take a part of the market. I bet the “older” nm scales are way more profitable to produce.

*I’ve used nm, as in nanometer. That is incorrect. Node names should have been used, n10, n7, n7p, n7+, n6, n6p, n5, n5p etc. For the truly interested tsmc just their annual tech symposium where the road map has been shown.

I have no idea why but there has been quite a few “rumours” about this.

Apple is a big customer for TSMC but booking TSMCs full capacity, full time does not seem realistic. I don’t know if people realise this but if those foundries run 24/7 they can produce a lot of chips, and that is a lot of new iphones :slight_smile:

Samsung has been on 5nm for a while but they are struggling at the moment with dramatically low yields. Most likely a temporary problem but with current yield ratios they won’t have significant orders from customers.

AMD is TSMCs biggest customer but AFAIK they don’t use 5nm for anything (may be for the new console modules, but I doubt it)

edit: FFS I forgot to mention the most importing thing, which was the reason I started writing this reply :slight_smile: TSMC only pushed 5nm for production when they received 5nm order guarantees from NVIDIA earlier this year.

The new consoles use a proven high yield node the cost on that scale and reliability is higher. Besides that, the development has been completed about a year before product launch when n5 wasn’t available. And on top of that, the console customers don’t care.

Just checked, it should be a 7nm node.