The outfit told the Taiwan Stock Exchange that its 16nm chips "smoothly entered" volume production as expected. It sounds like someone in TSMC's PR department has been reading 40 Shades of Grey again.

Production of a 16nm FinFET+ node was underway, with higher yields expected later this quarter. Nvidia wants to get its GP100 Pascal GPU manufactured on this node as it switches to 16nm next year.

TSMC's 16nm FinFET+ node will deliver twice the density and 65 percent higher speed at 70 percent less power than the current 28HPM process.

So far there has been a shortage of dates mentioned. We think that it will be the first quarter of 2016, with the hardware becoming available in the second quarter.

Both will still be behind Samsung, which is switching to 14nm fairly soon.