this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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Hardware

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TSMC's Sky-High Costs For 2nm Chips And Tight Production Capacity Scared Apple Into Dropping Them From iPhone 17 Pro Models (wccftech.com)
submitted 3 days ago by Alphane_Moon to c/hardware
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[–] avieshek 5 points 3 days ago

Nope, don’t push clickbaity articles from Wccftech. Apple along with the industry is supposed to utilise N3P in 2025 from N3E in 2024 before moving to N2 the trials of which is even yet to come while design and testing of chips take years (and not months) in advance.

[–] Alphane_Moon 4 points 3 days ago

Even Apple is finding it challenging to maintain an aggressive leading edge node adoption cadence.

Semiconductors performance is going to keep improving (in addition to fabrication nodes, we also have advanced packaging and new materials), there is just too much economic incentive around this area. That being said, it does seem costs are rising rapidly.

According to this source, TSMC's price per wafer increased from $4K in late 2015 to $17K in 2020. Current 3 nm wafer pricing is rumoured to be at ~$20K and 2nm wafer pricing is expected to be around $30K.

Of course, there are many other elements that contribute to the cost of manufacturing a semiconductor, but fab costs are on a near-exponential growth trajectory.