TSMC, AMD's chip manufacturing partner, has reportedly developed an "enhanced" version of the 5nm node specifically for the company's next-generation products. Well, the next next generation of products anyway. The Red Team's 5nm processors and graphics cards are still some way off, and as of now, only the AMD Zen 4 CPU is the subject of this ultra-low volume lithography.

A news article from Chainnews (via @chiakokhua) ostensibly describes the reduction in 5nm and 7nm production orders from Huawei, but the article also states that TSMC is not worried about this drop because Apple has caught up TSMC has requested a large amount of additional chip wafers and could be competing with AMD for 5nm demand at the end of this year.

However, the article also states: "TSMC is said to have developed an enhanced version of its 5nm process specifically for AMD, which requires AMD to have the capacity to produce more than 20,000 12-inch wafers per month.

Needless to say we are relying on machine translation from the original Chinese text, but we have looked at several different sources to try to get it right. One of these translated sources seemed to suggest that it was not necessarily an AMD-specific node, so a certain amount of sodium ingested is needed at this point.

However, the advanced new process already looks pretty tasty, given that TSMC has already claimed that its supposedly standard 5nm design offers a 1.84x improvement in transistor density over current 7nm chips.

While it is not necessarily known what the enhanced 5nm design will look like, or what the source of a particular process rumor actually is, there are still considerable details regarding TSMC's silicon weaving plans.

AMD, unlike Intel, does not actually manufacture the processors and graphics chips it sells and has been completely "fabless" since it sold its manufacturing division many years ago and subsequently became a separate company called GlobalFoundries. Today, they do not have their own factories and have to rely on contract manufacturers like TSMC for their silicon magic. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) is the world's largest manufacturer of chips for everything from Apple to Nvidia, and has been key to AMD's technological resurgence in recent years.

The upcoming AMD Zen 3 processor, which popular CEO Dr. Lisa Su has promised to announce by the end of the year, is manufactured on an enhanced version of the 7nm (or N7) process that was behind the success of the Ryzen 3000 series processors and Radeon 5000 series graphics cards. It is not 100% known whether it is TSMC's N7P or N7+ node, as AMD has been quite vague on this point in the past.

The difference could be significant. The slightly enhanced N7P design has been suggested to improve performance by 7% or reduce power consumption by 10% in terms of straight performance, while the more enhanced N7+ introduces a new kind of fabrication (called EUV, or Extreme Ultraviolet) that may improve performance by 15% or It has been suggested that it will reduce power consumption by 30%.

Wikichip delves into TSMC's future and reports that N5P, or an enhanced version of the standard 5nm process, is already in the pipeline for 2021; if Zen 3 ships at the end of this year, AMD's Zen 4 processor will be in late 2021 or 2022. which would be consistent with the timing of the N5P process.

According to Wikichip, the N5P node is to N5 as N7P is to N7, meaning that the enhanced 5nm lithography can offer about 7% higher performance than the standard node or operate at 15% lower power consumption with the same performance.

Whether this is an AMD-specific node will probably not be clear until next year, but it would be surprising if such an advanced process is exclusive to the Red Team. Apple would love to get its hands on TSMC's crown jewels.

If it's the processor, what about AMD's graphics cards: we know that RDNA 2 cards, the next-generation architecture of the Navi GPU in the Radeon RX 5700 XT and other products, will come out using the 7nm node, and Nvidia's graphics cards that can compete with top-of-the-line products may be on the horizon. However, AMD's current roadmap only mentions the Advanced Node, which will be used for the RDNA 3 GPU architecture that will be introduced at the same time as the Zen 4 CPU.

The choice between N5 and N5P will depend on the level of demand for both TSMC's 5nm node and AMD's Zen 4 processors; AMD's priority right now is processors (both desktop, high-end, and server) over graphics cards. There is no doubt that AMD is now prioritizing processors (both desktop, high-end and server) over graphics cards. After all, we are still waiting for a high performance GPU to really compete with Nvidia at the top.