Major chipmaker TSMC has reportedly encountered issues with its 3nm process yields, which could signal the start of trouble in the tech sphere.
A DigiTimes report citing industry sources says that TSMC is having trouble with the yields of its 3nm process.
The issues revolve around how many chips are not defective. Semiconductor manufacturing is a complicated and delicate process and there will always be a few faulty chips along the way.
downstream effects
In some cases, these can be repurposed for slightly less powerful chips: Apple, for example, sold a version of its M1 chip with slightly fewer GPU cores, presumably because they were part of defective batches that didn't need to go to waste.
If these issues persist, customers are likely to increase their confidence in TSMC's 5nm process, which could affect AMD, Nvidia and other users of the technology.
For its part, TSMC has not reported any issues with its 3nm process and says it is "on track with good progress."
TSMC is one of the biggest companies in the world right now, supplying chips to everyone from Apple to AMD to companies you haven't heard of. The global chip shortage has, rather counterintuitively, only bolstered TSMC, as desperate companies pay top dollar to mitigate shortfalls.
Given TSMC's position in a vitally important industry, failure to master the 3nm process will have several ripple effects.
According to DigiTimes, AMD currently makes extensive use of TSMC's 7nm processes (called N6 and N7). The upcoming Ryzen 7000 series will be based on TSMC's 5nm process (known as N5 and N4). Future chips, the ones currently under development, will be based on the 3nm process.
Interestingly, DigiTimes also reports that Samsung, another big player in chip manufacturing, has its own issues with 3nm. Samsung's recent 2200nm Exynos 4 wouldn't be the capable machine it could have been, so the company initially skipped its own launch event.
Via: Tom's Hardware