TSMC Shows 3.1 GHz CortexA9 Dual Core CPU and Doubles 28 nm Shipments

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Reportedly, TSMC has just announced that it managed to double its 28 nm manufacturing capacity when compared to the previous quarter. This means that a lot more AMD Radeon 7970 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 GPUs will be coming our way.

The thing is that TSMC, despite its huge manufacturing capacities, is still not able to fulfill the demands of its high performance customers.

The foundry is manufacturing lots of chips in the 150 nm, 130/110 nm, 90nm and 65/55 nm processes. Actually all these products make out around 63 percent of the foundry’s total output.

There’s also the popular 40 nm process that amounts for 32 percent of the total manufacturing output, and the most demanded 28 nm process is only left with 5 percent.

It’s in those 5 percent of volume where we find that 100 percent improvement.

Late last year, TSMC’s 28 nm manufacturing accounted for just 2 % of the company’s output, so going from 2% top 5% in one quarter is an improvement.

This won’t be enough to satisfy the likes of Qualcomm, AMD and Nvidia. We’ll see the supply of new GPUs and mobile processors improving, but there won’t be a significant improvement when the demand is so high.

TSMC is also delivering a marketing hit today as they’re presenting an ARM CortexA9 Dual Core test chip running at an impressive 3100 MHz clock frequency.

The company claims the CPU reaches the high speed while staying within the power specifications of a 40 nm chip working at 1.5 GHz.

It’s nice to see such progress and we eagerly await the new 3 GHz Qualcomm Krait processor based on the more capable Cortex A15 architecture.

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