It absolutely was not. The A15/"M2" architecture isn't even going to be on 3nm, it will be N5P, so only a "plus" of the current node. There was absolutely no scenario where Apple was on 3nm this year.

Incidentally this means that Apple will no longer have a node advantage once Zen4 launches - both Zen4 and A15 will be on the same node, so we can make direct comparisons without people insisting that Apple's performance is solely due to node advantage/etc.

But yeah, that does go to show that 3nm is slow to launch in general - Apple would not willingly give up their node lead like this if there were anything ready for an upgrade. I don't think it's actually falling behind in the sense that it was delayed, but it seems even TSMC is feeling the heat and slowing down their node cadence a bit.

Also, as far as this:

> Second, the recourse to two M1 Max chips fused into a M1 Ultra means TSMC’s 5 nm process has reached its upper limit.

There is still Mac Pro to come, and presumably Apple would want an actual Pro product to offer something over the Studio besides expansion.

marcan42 thinks it's not likely that quad-die Mac Pros are coming based on the internal architecture (there's only IRQ facilities for connecting 2 dies) but that still doesn't rule out the possibility of a larger die that is then connected in pairs.

Also bigger/better 5nm stuff will almost certainly be coming with A15 on N5P later this year, so this isn't even "the best TSMC 5nm has to offer" in that light either.