None of those are offering 5nm right now. There are only 7nm foundries out there, the article says they are perfecting their 5nm processes for commercialization, what means there are some months (maybe years) yet until we see them.
Also, Moore's Law is dead by years now. Not only process improvement became subexponential and much slower paced, but transistor density isn't growing much and the core of the Law that is cost/transistor has increased with the last 2 or 3 iterations, instead of going down.
Intel is still ahead of them, right? Last I’ve heard they are moving pretty aggressively on their “7nm”, which is supposed to be at least as good as TSMC’s “5nm”.
Compare min metal pitch for Intel’s “10nm” (36nm) and TSMC’s “7nm” (40nm) [1]
By 2025 they might figure out newer processes than 14nm, but even Intel and Global Foundries has hit a wall at 14nm. Samsung, TSMC and IBM are the only companies with productive sub-14nm fabs.
An ex manager from DARPA, which was responsible for similar stuff there said he believes that 5nm is the physical limit of scaling. but making them will be more complex, hence expensive, and he think the economics could stop working before.
Also if we're talking about the economics, there really are 2 foundries(TSMC and Globalfounries/Samsung alliance) make top-end chip for others(Intel doesn't count, chip designers don't/won't trust them). Do with almost no competition - do you expect prices to go down ?
So maybe we will see further performance improvements, But no cost reductions.
Intel has a 1.4nm process in the pipeline for ~2027. They just took delivery on their first high NA EUV machine in order to start working on it.
Their gamble however is that they need to figure out DSA, a long storied technology that uses self-forming polymers to allow less light to sharply etch smaller features.
If they figure out DSA, they will likely be ahead of TSMC. If not, it will just be more very expensive languishing.
https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/5_nm_lithography_process
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