A new report suggests that TSMC, the semiconductor manufacturer, could be having issues with its 3nm process. This could heavily impact AMD's next-gen CPUs.
New reports suggest that AMD’s future processors and graphics cards may be stalled due to issues at TSMC, the semiconductor foundry from which AMD gets its chips.
First reported by DigiTimes and later covered by TechRadar, the issues at TSMC seem to be centered around the fact that too many faulty 3nm chips have been produced. Sometimes, less-than-perfect chips can still be repurposed and used for a lower-performance version of the same chip, salvaging the tech — even if just to a lesser extent. If the 3nm nodes made by TSMC prove to be unusable, this could create a ripple effect spanning multiple manufacturers and product lines.
TSMC’s 3nm nodes are technically still unreleased, and judging by these issues, their release date may be pushed up to the second half of 2022 — or even beyond, if we’re unlucky. Needless to say, such a delay is almost bound to affect the potential release dates of products that will one day utilize TSMC’s 3nm process node. Many tech giants are interested in 3nm chips, including AMD.