Things are not going well in the silicon industry, since they are having problems with the jump to 7nm for AMD and the jump to 5nm is being much more difficult than expected and the first processors could be delayed through these processes of manufacturing.
We have been talking about the next manufacturing process for processors for a long time, specifically 7nm, which should give life to AMD processors and their professional graphics cards in the near future. Intel has had many problems making the jump to 10nm, that's why we have been living on refried 14nm for a long time and it seems that making the jump to 7nm and later to 5nm, will not be an easy thing. There are problems to create the chips under these nodes and the thing seems to delay the first silicones under these nodes.
It seems that they have become optimistic, when it comes to giving deadlines for 7nm and even more for 5nm. AMD's calendar is becoming unworkable and that is, the more the transistor size is reduced, the more problems appear and the more complex these problems are to solve. These problems are based on the complexity of the processors themselves, if we compare them with the NAND chips, which are more 'simple' to manufacture.
The main problem would be in the 'Extreme Ultra Violet' machines, manufactured by ASML, which are used for the manufacturing process of the processors. The company has said that they are working on better machines that can correct various problems in the 5nm manufacturing process, which have already been found. These machines will not be ready until the year 2024, much later than planned by AMD, which wanted to manufacture Zen 5 already in 5nm, within a couple of years.
Jumping into new manufacturing processes is increasingly complex and problems will appear, delaying companies' plans. GlobalFoundries, when it reached 14nm and then 12nm, it came with the advantage that Samsung had done the polishing work for these processes. This will not happen with 7nm and even less so with 5nm, since the first test wafers contain an error rate much higher than expected at this point in the development process.
Source: TPU
If we have seen Intel stagnant for so many years in 14nm and nobody said anything (except you) I do not see why we have to worry that AMD cannot easily go to 7 nm .. At least it has gone from 14 to 12nm and that it already has merit, that has not been achieved by intel in years ... if AMD did not step on the accelerator with ryzen, we would have intel even with the eternal promise of cannonlake that never came ... Wow, you hit the nail on the head with the machines and technology manufacturing in silicon ... One of the least bluish news you publish