This is not really a scoop because already during the year 2020 several leaks had mentioned the fact that AMD would have exclusive access to the N5P process of TSMC for Zen4. Lisa Si has just confirmed what has been said for several months. Because in fact, AMD expected to use the 5 nm resources during 2021. And by the arrival of Zen4, the founder will have already moved to 3nm at the end of 2022.
Coming back to N5P, this manufacturing process at TSMC is actually a kind of refinement of the 5nm used by Apple. The promise of this evolution is in particular a reduction of energy consumption up to 15% as well as a performance improvement of up to 7% compared to the 1st generation 5nm produced by the Taiwanese manufacturer.
An optimized 5 nm but will it be enough?
How can we analyze this relative “delay” when Intel has regained control of the performance field with 10nm and is preparing to invest massively at TSMC to allocate production capacity? In an interview with Ian Cutress, Lisa Su stressed that technology roadmaps are about making the right choices at the right times. For her, the engraving is important but it is the music of the whole that is important (architecture, packaging…). Finally, she said that the 5nm process that the brand will use is highly optimized for high-performance computing – it is not necessarily the same as other 5nm technologies. So we can see a certain inflection in the speech of the reds who were until now putting forward the superiority of their etching technology against their competitor.
