TSMC’s 3 Nm Process (2022) Will Be 30 Percent More Efficient Than 5 Nm

[Tsing]

Image: TSMC



At its annual Technology Symposium, TSMC shared plenty of new details regarding its upcoming process technologies, which include N5 (5 nm) and N3 (3 nm). While AMD’s 5 nm desktop processors are at least a year away, the semiconductor manufacturing giant is already promising that its successor, 3 nm, will improve performance and power efficiency by up to 15 percent and 30 percent, respectively.



“Compared to it’s N5 node, N3 promises to improve performance by 10-15% at the same power levels, or reduce power by 25-30% at the same transistor speeds,” wrote AnandTech. “Furthermore, TSMC promises a logic area density improvement of 1.7x, meaning that we’ll see a 0.58x scaling factor between N5 and N3 logic. This aggressive shrink doesn’t directly translate...

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[Uvilla]

Well I mean 3nm tsmc is like what? 22nm Intel?... Oh wait..

 

[Armenius]

Well I mean 3nm tsmc is like what? 22nm Intel?... Oh wait..

For nodes actually being made right now, I mean, TSMC's 6nm is only 1.07x more dense than Intel's 10nm. TSMC 5nm is estimated to be 171.3 MTr/mm², which would put 3nm at 291.21 MTr/mm². That's only 1.228x more dense than what Intel's 7nm is estimated to be.

 

[Zarathustra]

That seems way too optimistic.

Process nodes are nowhere near scaling linearly with feature size anymore. Haven't been since ~32nm

Linear scaling from 5 to 3 would be 40%.

30% is way too close to linear to be true.