TSMC hopes to produce its first 2nm etched chips in 2025with a pre-production phase as early as 2024. Several concordant sources indicate that Intel and Apple could be the first TSMC customers to take advantage of this N2 burning process.
Other TSMC customers, such as AMD, Broadcom or NVIDIA, use or will use the different versions of its N5 engraving (N5, N5P, N4, N4P or N4X) for their products, such as Hopper at NVIDIA or chips Genoa and Raphael at AMD. These companies are already in talks with TSMC to take advantage of the – inevitably limited – production capacities of 3 nm (N3) engraving, probably at the end of 2023 or in 2024. It is therefore highly likely that these same companies will start here next year the negotiations to access the foundry’s 2 nm production, but this will necessarily place them after Intel and Apple.
Intel : Lunar Lake gravé en Intel 18A + TSMC N2 ?
If we do not yet know which SoC(s) will benefit from this 2 nm engraving process at Apple, it is (slightly) less vague at Intel. The Lunar Lake chips will use the Intel 18A burning process developed internally for the CPU part, but will also use an “external” burning process for the GPU part, probably the N2 precisely from TSMC. We can therefore expect the first Lunar Lake processors to hit the market at the very end of 2025, or rather the beginning of 2026. By then, we will have had the pleasure of tasting the Raptor Lake, Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake…
Sources : Digitimes, UDN, China Renaissance