> milyen következtetést lehet levonni
> az AMD wafer ellátottságára és annak jövőbeli árazására vonatkozólag.
a TSMC-nek is alkalmazkodni kell a piaci körülményekhez.
Lehetséges, hogy valamilyen árcsökkentéssel vonzóvá teszi az N3-as platformot.
TSMC Might Cut 3nm Prices to Lure AMD, Nvidia
By Anton Shilov published 5 days ago
Industry sources say TSMC is considering lowering 3nm prices to stimulate interest from chip designers
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tsmc-might-cut-3nm-prices-to-lure-amd-nvidia
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We believe the meaningful [N3] ramp-up will be in 2H 2023 when the optimized version, N3E, will be ready," wrote Szeho Ng, an analyst with China Renaissance. "Its major customers in HPC (i.e., AMD, Intel), smartphone (i.e., QCOM, MTK) and ASIC (i.e., MRVL, AVGO, GUC) will likely stay in N4/5 and choose N3E as their maiden N3 class foray, in our view. Meanwhile, we believe the baseline N3 (aka N3B) adoption will be largely limited to Apple products."
To stimulate its partners into using its N3-class process technologies, TSMC is reportedly considering lowering its quotes for these nodes. In particular, TSMC's N3E process uses EUV only for up to 19 layers and features somewhat lower complexity in terms of manufacturing, and is thus cheaper to use. TSMC could lower quotes of N3E production without harming profitability. N3E provides zero advantages over N5 when it comes to SRAM cell scaling, which means larger die sizes when compared to those made on N3/N3B.
AMD publicly announced that it planned to use an N3 node for some of its Zen 5-based designs due in 2024, and Nvidia is expected to adopt N3 for its next-generation Blackwell architecture-based GPUs set to arrive around the same timeframe. Due to high costs, adoption of N3-class nodes is expected to be limited to certain products — so lowering quotes will probably make chip designers reconsider their adoption strategy.
There's also another issue with TSMC's N3: low yields. Some estimate yields are between 60% and 80%, and sources at DigiTimes (via Dan Nystedt) indicate that they're below 50%. That said, since only Apple reportedly uses this manufacturing technology and the company is known for being very secretive, any details about yields of initial N3 chips should be taken with a large grain of salt."
Mottó: "A verseny jó!"