> I don't think they have the fab capacity to be able to do that
Do you have a source for there being any fab capacity shortage for Apple (or anyone, for that matter) at 5nm? Older nodes are a different story because that's still where most of TSMC's customers are doing their high-volume production.
I think plenty of people will skip it. Even ignoring the high cost, not everything scales as well with every new node. There're plenty of customers who will have no interest in this node right now and some that will have no interest in it ever. I've not seen anything that suggests capacity shortages at 5nm yet, especially for Apple who've already booked all of 3nm for next-gen.
SRAM scaling from 7nm to 5nm is pitiful. While the CPU transistors see 50-70% increases, the SRAM is only shrinking 20-30%.
For chips with massive cache, that isn’t super cost effective (I suspect as a cost saving measure that we’ll see L2/L3 cache moving to a separate chip on a larger process while the rest shrinks down).
Do you have a source for there being any fab capacity shortage for Apple (or anyone, for that matter) at 5nm? Older nodes are a different story because that's still where most of TSMC's customers are doing their high-volume production.