ARM and TSMC jointly announced today that they’ve finished tape-out on a Cortex-A57 processor designed on TSMC’s upcoming 16nm FinFET hybrid process. This is a major step for both companies — TSMC has been working to ramp its 16nm FinFET plans for months, and ARM’s 64-bit Cortex-A57 is an integral part of the UK-based designer’s server strategy. This news, however, has been vastly overblown, with some sites trumpeting that the 16nm FinFET A57 is now “ready for mass production.” Nothing could be further from the truth. During TSMC’s last conference call, CEO Morris Chang gave some guidance on the company’s roadmap through 2015.

TSMC expects 28nm shipments to grow by 3x this year compared to 2012, with the first 20nm shipments occurring in 2014. He believes 20nm shipments in 2014 will be larger than 28nm shipments in 2012, while 20nm shipments in 2015 will be larger than the company’s 28nm shipments in 2013.

When asked how much volume TSMC would be doing on 16nm in 2015, Chang responded “I think it will be very small.” And that tracks perfectly with what we’ve previously seen from ARM/TSMC collaborations. The first Cortex-A15 built on 20nm with TSMC taped out in 2011. If Chang’s remarks are accurate, we might see such a chip come to market in 2014 or 2015 — three or four years after tape-out.

This seemingly contradicts TSMC’s own published roadmaps that claim the company will begin “risk production” on 16nm in 2013. What it actually illustrates is that TSMC’s roadmaps are often extremely… creative. Clearly, the company is working on 16nm FinFET right now, but Chang’s own statements make it clear that they’re nowhere near commercial volume and don’t expect to be for another three years.

The other major misconception we want to address is the idea that the Cortex-A57 is going to be a smartphone processor. As with the Cortex-A15, yes, there will be smartphones that use these chips — but it’s quite telling that all the major product announcements to date have targeted server hardware. Scaling a chip as powerful as the A57 down to smartphone TDPs and thermals is going to be difficult; there simply is no free lunch in this context and the challenges of scaling to smaller nodes and dealing with increased gate leakage are only getting worse as time goes by.

The next 18-24 months in smartphones will be dominated by a mixture of Cortex-A9 parts at the low end (like Nvidia’s Tegra 4i) and Cortex-A15-class processors. Adoption of the latter will accelerate when 20nm chips become available, but don’t expect a huge ramp there until 2015.

We’ll start to see the first ARMv8 products in that time frame (the X-Gene supposedly launches later this year), but I expect ARMv8 ramps will kick into high gear once 20nm is available. The 16nm FinFET version is even further out. Servers, not smartphones, are the initial target for these products — like the Cortex-A15, which substantially improved performance at the cost of power consumption, the A57 will take some massaging before its ready to debut in a device the size of your pocket.

There are other factors that also need to be addressed — 64-bit programs are larger than 32-bit applications and they consume more system RAM. These differences are trivial on a desktop or laptop, where the increased performance more than compensates, but they may be a greater barrier in smartphones where RAM and storage are constrained to minimize power consumption.

Now read: In 2013, the ARMpire strikes back