TSMC, AMD’s best friend in the contract chip manufacturing game, has announced that its new 7nm+ process has gone into high volume production, just in time for the red team to start thinking about what it wants to do with those Zen-based Ryzen 4000 CPUs next year. So if you thought TSMC’s 7nm process was the big thing in chips right now you’d be wrong, it’s this 7nm+ process. Or rather, to give the new advanced node its proper designation, N7+. Yeah, it’s not just Intel getting in on the ‘+’ process game, after iteration after iteration of 14nm CPUs, TSMC is also shipping new revisions of existing nodes. But that’s probably doing N7+ a bit of a disservice as the new process is going to be the first to utilise EUV patterning in the manufacturing process in order to reduce the complexity, and eventually the cost, of creating new chips. It’s also going to offer higher performance and greater transistor density than the previous 7nm node, which should mean good things for AMD’s next generation of CPUs launching in 2020.