Qualcomm has released the third generation 5G baseband Snapdragon X60 based on 5nm process in advance. But it was manufactured by Samsung and will not be commercially available until next year. Now TSMC's 5nm process is ready.
TSMC will start mass production of 5nm chips in April. Initial production capacity has been fully booked by customers, kkj.cn quoted industry sources as saying.
Judging from the available information, the largest head of 5nm production capacity is occupied by Apple, and the target is the A14 processor for the new iPhone in the fall. The remaining major customers should also be Huawei Hisilicon.
In the past, TSMC's new process has always been started by FPGA giant Xilinx, but Versal Premium, which Xilinx only launched this week and is scheduled to sample in 2021, is still 7nm, but it does support PCIe 5.0.
In addition, AMD ’s 5nm will have to wait for next year ’s Zen 4 debut, and there is still a lot of uncertainty as to whether NVIDIA ’s Apere is in place at 5nm.
Back to TSMC 5nm itself, there are two versions of N5 and N5P. N5 has a 15% improvement in performance over a 7nm process, a 30% reduction in power consumption and an 80% increase in crystal density. N5P performance is 7% stronger than N5, and power consumption has dropped by 15% again.
It is said that the performance of A14 will be comparable to the Intel 6-core 45-watt mobile standard voltage processor. The performance of Kirin 1020 is up to 50% higher than that of Kirin 990.
