The ongoing viability of Moore's law is up for debate. But it seems Taiwanese megfab TSMC is determined to crank out new silicon regardless.
The latest reports claim TSMC's next-gen 2nm chip node, branded N2, is set for volume production later this year. However, it's unlikely we'll see TSMC N2 chips in our PCs until at the very earliest 2026 and maybe even 2027 and beyond.
According to Chinese news site UDN, progress with N2 at TSMC's «Kaohsiung» or North fab is going better than expected, allowing the company to stick to plans going back to 2023 for mass production later this year.
As ever, Apple is expected to be the first customer for the new N2 node, though UDN claims Huida, Qualcomm and MediaTek and, wait for it, AMD are in the running to be early adopters.
However, before anyone expects N2 chips in their PCs in 2025, the timeline is a little more laggy than that. As Dylan Patel from SemiAnalysis points out, even with mass production in late 2025, it'll take a while before we see N2 chips in products we can buy. «N2 wafers take ~14 weeks to be fabricated across thousands of steps + couple months for packaging assembly.