OVer the last 3 years, Intel decided to speed up its processes to always thinner engraving. Within couple of years, we moved from 90 nm to 60, then 45 nm for arriving today at 32 nm. Each step towards a thinner engraving process requires a lot of investment (financial and engineer resources). With its well-known R&D, Intel keeps moving on while competitors are still struggling to follow. AMD is only managing 45-nm engraving process now, while on-demand founders such as TSMC and UMC are having hard time to reliably produce components at 40 nm. According to different sources, TSMC might have decided to stop moving to 32-nm engraving and immediately get start working on the next step: 28 nm. They will also redirect part of their R&D to improve the yield for production at 40 nm as this is impacting the availability of ATI and NVIDIA GPUs.
