TSMC's next-gen 2nm silicon is reportedly on track for later this year but don't expect chips for PCs until 2027 and beyond
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. The absolute soonest a product can come out with N2 is ~Q2 2026,» Patel points out.
Of course, it's also worth noting that neither AMD nor Nvidia is even using TSMC's N3 node yet. Indeed, both companies are in the throes of releasing brand new GPU families on the old N4 node, which is a development of N5 or 5nm silicon.
That is despite the fact that the Apple iPhone 15 Pro went on sale in September 2023 with N3 silicon and TSMC has since introduced two further derivations of its 3nm node, known as N3E and N3P, the former being used in Apple's M4 chips for MacBooks and A18 SoCs for iPhones.
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In other words, we're 18 months out from the first N3-based products, and you still can't buy anything with N3 from AMD or Nvidia. Add 18 months to the
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