So many processes have been announced that I no longer know how many are being manufactured, TSMC itself is implementing 5nm, 4nm, 3nm and 2nm processes.
Now, the company has announced that it will launch a revision of the 3nm manufacturing process, dubbed 3nm Plus, in 2023. According to DigiTimes, the Taiwanese manufacturer’s first customer for this process will be Apple.
There is no information on what exactly 3nm Plus takes advantage of and what it offers over the 3nm “vanilla” process. It could be anything from higher transistor density, lower power consumption, or higher operating frequency, or maybe a mix of all three.
The original 3nm manufacturing process is configured to deliver a 15% performance gain over the current top-of-the-line 5nm node, with 30% less power use and up to 70% increase in density.