Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has, so far, been the only company capable of producing 7nm chips, and as the company with the leading edge process, TSMC has gained some very large orders from companies like AMD, Apple and Qualcomm.
7nm demand has been very high and Digitimes reported an anonymous source stated that lead time for production has tripled from two months to nearly six months, due to this strong demand.
This has lead to a tighter supply which could affect AMD’s Ryzen 3000 and Radeon 5700/XT products since they use 7nm. This could also cause issues with 3rd generation Threadripper and new Navi GPUs that should be releasing in the near future.
AMD isn’t alone in this though, as the iPhone 11’s A13 chip uses 7nm and Qualcomm’s latest designs will also be fabricated on the node. Nvidia will eventually also shift to 7nm with its next generation RTX cards, although they are known to be using Samsung for some products at least. This might not cause a huge issue immediately at TSMC, but if the problems persist this could lead to long-lasting supply issues next year.
AMD has stated that they are “Very well positioned to meet demand” for the new EPYC Rome processors in a recent briefing on Tuesday. He went on to say “We will be able to meet the needs of a fantastic level of interest, [TSMC has] full commitment to ramp up to volumes needed for this market.”
A contributing factor to this could be the fact that Intel has had issues with their 14nm production due to them shifting fabrication plants to 10nm and never getting 10nm off the ground. This demand that Intel has left on the market is certainly a contributing factor to AMD’s increased demand.
That being said, rumors on shortages tend to be a coin flip on validity. Whether there will be any real effect on the market is unknown as this is very early in the rumors and speculation, so I wouldn’t rush out and buy two dozen Ryzen CPUs just yet.
