TSMC has made multiple statements over the past few days regarding the future of its 16nm and 10nm product launches. According to the Taiwanese foundry, it’s reached significant milestones in both areas.

First, it’s gotten figures back on the early validation samples of what it calls 16FF (that’s standard 16nm FinFET). The company writes: “Silicon results on 16FF show the ‘big’ Cortex-A57 processor achieving 2.3GHz for sustained mobile peak performance.” That phrase “sustained mobile peak performance” is obfuscated to the point of being nearly unintelligible. All modern mobile CPUs from every vendor throttle under sustained load and are designed to do so in order to preserve battery life and not overheat the device. “Sustained mobile peak performance” could mean “This is the clock speed the chip can hold for an indefinite period of time,” or it could mean “This is the peak performance the chip can sustain for an unspecified period of time.” If your peak performance period is 10 minutes long, that’s one thing — if it’s 10 seconds long, that’s something else.

TSMC also claims that the lower-performance Cortex-A53 on 16nm FF will consume just 75mW “for most common workloads.” Again, that’s a significant jump forward. TSMC is also discussing a new type of FinFET process (FF+), which is expected to start ramping up late this year and which will deliver a further 11% performance gain for the Cortex-A57 and a 35% reduction for the Cortex-A53 when running in minimal power consumption mode.

The early state of 10nm production

Yesterday, TSMC announced it had inked a new agreement with ARM to support development on the 10nm node, with “early pathfinding work… as early as Q4 2015.” This is being read, in some circles, as proof that TSMC is going to close the production gap between itself and Intel. A look at historical data, however, illustrates that there’s a substantial gap between when TSMC initiates these early explorations of a node and when hardware built on that node is ready to ship.

TSMC’s 2008 annual report indicates that its 28nm program had passed the “pathfinding” stage already, despite not debuting in volume manufacturing until 2011. At that point, the company was exploring the very early steps of the pathfinding process for 22/20nm, which it had formally begun by 2010 (according to that year’s annual report).

In other words, according to the timelines established by TSMC’s previous node shrinks, the company begins pathfinding 3-4 years before the actual foundry technology is ready to ship. There’s nothing wrong with that timeline and it’s not slow considering the simultaneous difficulty of finding alternate solutions to EUV at the 10nm node — but it’s an example of how dates get manipulated in foundry technology to create impressions that aren’t necessarily accurate. TSMC’s second press release makes no mention of EUV at all, confirming our suspicion that this next-generation technology is going to remain next-generation for quite awhile longer.

If TSMC keeps to its established cadences, we’ll see initial 16nm shipments in late 2015 with mainstream adoption in 2016. Realisticallly, we’ll probably see the company’s 16nm FF+ adopted in late 2016 or early 2017 as a half-step before 10nm shipments begin in 2017 or 2018. Despite the promise of early pathfinding, history points to a longer, slower rollout.

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