TSMC’s 3nm fabrication process could revolutionize the silicon industry in 2022

The world's biggest chip foundry TSMC is breaking records each year and grossing profits which you could never have imagined. Each year, they are shrinking their transistors and enabling efficient…

By Raunak Saha

November 29, 2020

2 min read

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The world’s biggest chip foundry TSMC is breaking records each year and grossing profits which you could never have imagined. Each year, they are shrinking their transistors and enabling efficient as well as powerful processors.

Take, for example, the new Apple M1 chip-based 5nm process has managed to beat hefty CPUs like Core i9-9900H drawing just 10W of power. This level of performance and efficiency have never been seen before, this is what TSMC is bringing to the chip industry.

Apart from the fact that Apple is TSMC’s biggest client, the Taiwanese foundry also supplies its chips to giants like AMD, MediaTek, NVIDIA, Qualcomm and others. TSMC has recently confirmed the fact that its 3nm production node is on track for full mass production in H2 2022, as per ITHome.

This is kind of expected, provided the fact that TSMC is investing millions of dollars in its R&D, even the 2nm node is in development already. TSMC’s 3nm node will pack in almost 250 million transistors per square millimetre of silicon which is almost two and half times denser than Intel’s 10nm node.

TSMC unveils its new 6nm chip manufacturing process

Whereas, to GPUs, this means a 3nm based GPU could pack in three times more transistors than the recently announced Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs. TSMC has promised 250 million transistors per square millimetre for its 3nm node; however, the reality may turn out nearer 300 million.

This means 2.5x and 3x as denser chips than the current 7nm tech seen in AMD CPUs and graphics cards. Although I won’t be surprised if Apple brings 3nm based Apple Silicon in 2022, with immediate mass production, it might take some time for 3nm process to revolutionize the PC market.

AMD is expected to bring 5nm to Ryzen chips next year sometime now for their Zen 4 based processors, TSMC’s 4nm node could be an option for a lot of big players in the market as well. It might take some time for 3nm to be a reality, but considering the fact of how fast the industry is evolving, the performance improvement in the next 3-4 years could be breathtaking.

via PCGamer