When we have not yet seen the CPUs and GPUs under the 5nm node on PCs, if we discard the mobile world of course, the different foundries or chip factories finalize the future manufacturing processes. Well, it seems that TSMC’s N3E node would go from strength to strength in terms of its development, so much so that they would even advance its date. What are the details?
As new manufacturing nodes arrive, they are increasingly expensive to deploy and also to develop for them. The so-called 3nm nodes are certainly controversial in that it will coincide with the disaggregation of CPUs and GPUs into several different chips and not all parts require such an advanced manufacturing node. So we will end up seeing the occasional Frankenstein that combines chips with different manufacturing nodes interconnected with each other.
TSMC could advance its N3E node
According to Morgan Stanley at TSMC they would have finished the development process of their node N3E earlier than expected and therefore this would mean that the chips under said node would not go into production in the third quarter of 2023, but in the second of the same year. It is a variant of the N3 manufacturing node, but with a lower density per area that is in order to reduce costs together with a greater production capacity. In addition, it is designed to reduce the dependency of the EUV machinery on the standard node.
Compared with the standard 3nm node from TSMC or N3, the N3E has 8% lower density and all thanks to trimming 4 EUV layersbut it can still fit in the same space as a 5nm chip up to 60% more transistors. So it is an excellent manufacturing node for those designs that do not require the full potential of the 3nm foundry of nationalist China.
At the moment we do not know what processors will be developed under this node, although we know that some Tile GPUs in Intel CPUs from Meteor Lake will be manufactured under TSMC’s 3nm nodes. We do not know at the moment if there are plans to use this node for some of the models. The same can be said for NVIDIA and AMD, there are still a few months to go for the RTX 40 and RX 7000 based on the 5nm node. Taking into account that it takes between two or three years to see a new generation of graphics architectures, we still have to wait a long time.
It could disrupt the roadmap of some products
And not exactly for the worse, the fact that the N3E node is available in Q2 2023 may mean that the products designed for this node are brought forward from a market launch in early 2024 to the holiday season of 2023. And this would mean that a large number of products may not see the light of day as they coincide with other proposals that are more advanced in time.
In any case, it is important to stress again how expensive TSMC’s 3nm wafers will be for many manufacturers. There is talk of costs of 17,000 dollars for 5nm and this is growing with each generation and at a much higher rate than the increase in density per area in them.
