They started in the third quarter 2020, as emerges from the quarterly financial statement of the Korean company, the shipments d ei first chips produced by Samsung foundries using technology productive at 5 nanometers . Specifically, it is the 5LPE process, Low Power Early, which represents an evolution of that 7LPP (7 nanometers low power performance).

The characteristics of this process, based on extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography , allow to obtain an increase of about 10% performance in terms of clock frequency with the same complexity of the chip and applied power, or a reduction of 20% of the required power with the same complexity and clock frequency. In the passage from 7nm to 5nm a reduction of the surface of about the 25% , obviously with the same complexity of the chip.

The new production process will be used for the production of SoCs for higher-end smartphones , historically the first products to benefit from adoption of a new and more sophisticated production technology. The same of the rest can be said of the Taiwanese TSMC , which uses its own 5 nanometer process for manufacturing of new chips including the latest Kirin SoC from HiSilicon (Huawei) and the one adopted by Apple for the new generation of iPhone smartphones.

Not only: Samsung expects to expand during the fourth quarter 2020 the production of chips with the 8-nanometer HPC process . This is the one with which Samsung produces the chips used in video cards NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3000 based on Ampere architecture.

Numeric details are missing referring to the increase of high performance chips that Samsung intends to deliver in larger volumes to its partners over the last 3 months of 2020, but it is desirable that most of these are the NVIDIA GPUs of the GeForce RTX family 3000 . The speed with which the video cards of the Ampere family were sold in a very short time, leaving most fans empty-handed, suggests that the production volumes guaranteed by Samsung were initially too low.