TSMC is an industry leader in the development of new nodes or manufacturing processes for silicon chips and has confirmed that it has two nodes at 7 nm, one of which specializes in the manufacture of GPUs.
TSMC works on two nodes at 7nm, one of them for GPUs
In the market we can find a multitude of different chips such as CPUs and GPUS of PCs and mobile devices and memory chips, all of them have different characteristics, so a specialized manufacturing process is needed to offer maximum performance. TSMC has two nodes at 7 nm, one of them focused on achieving maximum energy efficiency in mobile devices, and the other focused on achieving maximum performance in PC graphics cards.
This second node at 7 nm would be the one used by Nvidia and AMD to manufacture their new graphics cards, it is a manufacturing process focused on obtaining the highest possible operating frequencies, and thus the best performance in devices that do not depend on a battery to operate. We’ll have to wait until 2019 to see the first GPUs made with this process at 7 nm, which means it won’t be used on the new graphics cards that will be released this year.
The 7 nm TSMC node for mobile devices would be the one used by Apple to build its new A12 processor, which will represent a significant leap forward from the current A11 Bionic manufactured at 10 nm.