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For a while, TSMC appeared to be ahead of the pack by producing chipsets used in smartphones that were smaller and more efficient than the competition. But now it looks like TSMC’s rival Samsung has beaten the company to the punch in the production of chips built on the 3nm process.
Samsung has announced that they have started to produce 3nm chips, where according to the company, chips built using their 3nm process are said to be 45% more power efficient compared to its 5nm chips, and also boasts a 23% improvement in performance. This means that devices that use chips built using this process will not only be more energy efficient, but should also be more powerful.
For those unfamiliar as to why this is a big deal, when it comes to chip fabrication, the number of cores in a chip shouldn’t always be the main thing to look for, but its size. The smaller it is, the closer its transistors are to each other which means that data can be passed around in a shorter amount of time, making it faster and less energy consuming.
TSMC is of course working towards their own 3nm production, but it is only expected to kick off in the later half of 2022, meaning that Samsung has a small head start on them. According to Samsung, its 3nm chips will initially be used for “high performance, low power computing”, but they do expect it to eventually make its way to mobile devices. Whether or not we’ll see this in future handsets like the Samsung Galaxy S23 remains to be seen, but overall, it’s good progress on Samsung’s end.
Source: Samsung
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