A quintillion transistors every six months?
TSMC is a Taiwanese semiconductor producer. According to a recent article in Wired: 'Every six months, just one of [TSMC's] 13 fabrication plants “carves and etches” a quintillion transistors just for Apple.'
But according to TSMC's own blog in August 2020: “Since [April 2018], we have manufactured 7nm chips for well over 100 products from dozens of customers. It is enough silicon to cover more than 13 Manhattan city blocks, and with more than a billion transistors per chip, this is true Exa level, or over one quintillion 7nm transistors.”
Did Wired really get their figure wrong by at least a factor of 5? There seems to be confusion over the timescale as well as over which customers were involved. Or have TSMC stepped up their productivity massively in the last three years?
The Wired article also makes this eye-popping claim: “the semiconductor industry churns out more objects in a year than have ever been produced in all the other factories in all the other industries in the history of the world.” This I can believe.