According to recent rumors it seems that TSMC and Samsung will be able to push out 14nm full node and 16nm half node FinFET products earlier than anticipated. This is certainly going to be good news for many customers of the two foundry companies including Apple and nVidia.

In the world of silicon size matters, but not in the traditional way. Manufacturers are always looking to make things smaller so they can stuff more into the same space. However there are two types of die shrinks. In the CPU world you see what it commonly referred to as full die shrinks while GPUs tend to do things in half-node steps.