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[Bofferbrauer2]

Pemalite said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

As far as I remember, there was a news a couple weeks ago (think in October) that AMD would get a higher amount of Wafers (due to mobile clients moving to 5nm processes, leaving more room for the 7nm of AMD) for 2021. If that holds true, then the supply situation could improve starting March

Might improve... But low-end SoC's might start gobbling up some of that capacity... Most budget SoC's are still using 14nm or a derivative of such like 11nm or 12nm and will likely shift to 7nm as capacity becomes free.

I.E the MediaTek G Series is all stuck at 12nm right now and MediaTek will likely start shifting those SoC's to 7nm at TSMC very soon.
And lower-end SoC's is where the volume is.

Qualcomm and nVidia are also rumored to be jumping some products back over to TSMC as well... And Intel is looking towards TSMC at the moment while it pivots around it's 10nm disaster.

The consoles are also selling better than expected with Microsoft and Sony amending and raising forecasts, so there could be extra chips for those markets as well.

It will be an interesting year at any rate.

Fab 18 was supposed to be finished in 2020, but Covid delayed that one. This new Fab is supposed to produce in 3/5/7nm, so from that alone the capacity should increase.

As for the low-end chips, a few were even still on 28/22/20nm. Those will migrate to 16/14nm while the 12/10nm will be the main growth region for those chips. These are also TSMC's own value proposition for mobile chips, and have been recently updated to 12/16nm FFC+ for better power savings and slight speed increases:

Another thing to consider is that AMD's process is the "simple" N7 whereas TSMC has more advanced versions of it (N7+ and N6, which are basically N7 with some or a lot of EUV) which are certainly more adapted for a mobile clientele.

Speaking of it, I expect AMD to go right to N5P with Zen 4 and RDNA 3.