5nm started risk production were direct from TSMC report. They are expecting even faster ramp than 7nm. And TSMC has a history of being very conservative.
Their approach has been iteration rather than a leap like Intel did. And you can bet it will arrive on scheduled for next year's Apple iPhone.
There are roadmap, tools, technique for 3nm ( As explained in the Article ) and even 2nm. So none of these are pipe dreams. As long as these customers can keep paying top dollar to be on leading node, TSMC seems to have no problem with innovating. The question is when will these clients slow down and stop paying every year because leading node is too expensive. Basically the cost of designing leading node is doubling every two year. So we are seeing something like the inverse of Moore's Law.
I bet yes, just the top dog clients will have to change. See, semiconductor companies might look like quite formidable, but the Internet companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google actually have more money then even them. They will pay.
For consumer electronics, there is genuinely no benefits now going to smaller nodes, but for something like a "single chip supercomputer" type products, made with the most over the top semi tech, there is no better client than them.
For them, they are basically turning joules into ad clicks, and thus money, much akin to that bitcoin thing, which up until few years ago was one of the biggest semiconductor consumer globally.
> Internet companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google actually have more money then even them. They will pay.
I agree. And this is where the market dynamics changes, it will be interesting when the cost / economics model changes how things will unfold. Especially Amazon as they are already designing their own ARM CPU for Cloud Services.
The performance of an individual transistor actually went down in 14>10>7 transition, but since you can pack more of them, the net effect is gain for companies with huge chips
Yes, but I think the cost of the chip (and cost per transistor on the chip) is starting to go back up again with each die shrink, rather than down every die shrink.
I'm not saying they're pipe dreams. I'm saying things go wrong sometimes. How many companies have never missed a deadline? I'm not even saying that to be argumentative - I am genuinely curious.
It sounds like you're still not taking seriously the fact that 5nm isn't just planned, but already well into the execution phase. It's far enough along that the worst case scenario at this point would be for TSMC's 5nm to be much more usable than Intel's first attempt at 10nm. The horizon for really serious unforeseeable problems is well past 5nm already.
5nm started risk production were direct from TSMC report. They are expecting even faster ramp than 7nm. And TSMC has a history of being very conservative.
Their approach has been iteration rather than a leap like Intel did. And you can bet it will arrive on scheduled for next year's Apple iPhone.
There are roadmap, tools, technique for 3nm ( As explained in the Article ) and even 2nm. So none of these are pipe dreams. As long as these customers can keep paying top dollar to be on leading node, TSMC seems to have no problem with innovating. The question is when will these clients slow down and stop paying every year because leading node is too expensive. Basically the cost of designing leading node is doubling every two year. So we are seeing something like the inverse of Moore's Law.