TSMC has started manufacturing the N3 in Taiwan

Chip production volume is largely responsible for energy efficiency and power consumption. In the last generation of GPUs, AMD still relied on TSMC and its 7nm process, while Nvidia made Samsung on its 8nm process. As a result, AMD cards were more efficient and required less power. TSMC is now once again the manufacturer of Nvidia’s current highly efficient graphics cards and has made great progress over this revised five-nanometer process.

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The manufacturer has now celebrated a series production in the N3 node, which represents the company’s latest technology. TSMC makes it clear that despite the increase in foreign investment, Taiwan will remain at the heart of the company. In Arizona, on the other hand, production will begin at the N4 node from 2024 and the cost of the production facility is estimated to be around US$40 billion. From 2026, production will also take place there at N3. Above all, American companies such as AMD, Apple and Nvidia should become customers of the new plant and take advantage of geographical proximity.

Compared with the N5, the computing power of the N3 increases by 10 to 15 percent, while the power consumption remains constant. Alternatively, power consumption can be reduced by 25 to 35 percent with the same computing power. But this is not all the advantages. The logical density can be increased by 70 percent and the SRAM density by 20 percent, which can reduce the chip size by 25 to 30 percent.

TSMC is still planning the N3E process with improved features for 2023, which should be of particular interest to Apple. It will be ideal for the new M2 Max and M2 Ultras, which are due to replace the M1 models soon, but have not yet been confirmed. This can improve important factors such as heat dissipation and efficiency, so they can also be installed in small devices without any problems.

Source: golem & TSMC