TSMC's upcoming 5nm process has already hit yields of 50%, meaning 50% of all processors yielded on a 5nm wafer are fully functional.

According to a China Times report, AMD's Zen 4 architecture will be fabricated on the 5nm process.

The report claims mass production of TSMC's 5 nm chips will begin in the first quarter of next year at the earliest.

Major 5nm chip designs including Apple's A14, the Hisilicon 1000, and AMD chips based on the Zen 4 architecture, according to the report. The firts two chips are expected to power Apple's iPhone 12 and Huawei's Mate 40 flagship smartphones, respectively. AMD's Zen 4 is expected in 2021 at the earliest, and possibly even 2022.

Although the report sounds optimistic in terms of time frames, TSMC mentioned earlier this year that its 5nm process has entered the risk production stage.

According to TSMC, the new 5nm node reportedly brings a 1.8x greater density over 7nm and 15% higher clock speeds at the same power, or reduce power consumption by 30% (meaning processor designers will have to choose one or a blend of both).

TSMC announced in October that it had significantly increased the capital expenditure from $14 billion to $15 billion, with $2.5 billion to set for use for the 5 nm production capacity needs.

Meanwhile, Intel suffers to move from the 14nm process because its 10nm development was extremely troubled. Intel's 10nm process is finally live but the company only uses it for a handful of laptop CPUs, likely due to supply constraints.

Samsung is said to have won manufacturing orders for Nvidia's upcoming 7nm GPUs, but that remains to be seen. It's not clear how well Samsung's 7nm process compares to TSMC's.