The Snapdragon 855 chip that was officially unveiled today is likely to be based on TSMC's 7nm process. Since this, the "Tianzi No. 1" foundry has successfully won Apple, Huawei , AMD, NVIDIA, Xillinx and other giants.
However, even so, a bad news came, Digitimes quoted a report saying that the 7nm production capacity originally planned to be deployed by TSMC in the first half of 2019 will not be fully loaded, and on the contrary, some will be idle.
This is because Apple, Huawei and Qualcomm have all cut orders recently, causing TSMC's 7nm utilization to drop to 80~90%.
Because at the financial meeting in November, TSMC's prospects for 7nm were still very good, and even revealed that there were 50 plans that were already being made, and there will be more than 100 models next year. So whether the above report is reliable, may eventually have to wait until the investor meeting in mid-January next year.
In addition, it is not surprising that Apple cut orders. After all, iPhone XS/XR sales are not good, but it seems a bit difficult to explain that Huawei, which is growing rapidly and Qualcomm, which bets on 5G, suddenly shrinks its front line.
