Taiwanese foundry chip maker TSMC reported a better-than-expected fourth quarter financial results, chalking up 4.4% gain year-on-year in the consolidated revenue in the fourth quarter ended on Dec. 31, 2018. The fourth quarter revenue was 11.3% up quarter-on-quarter.

The breakdown of the revenues by node shows that its 7nm node production represented 23% of the pure-play foundry service company’s fourth quarter revenue. Yet, the 28nm and below node turned out to be the largest revenue contributor, suggesting that there have been a lot busier design activities for chips of 28nm and below than cutting-edge 10 nm and below chips.

According to the data disclosure, 10nm node process technology accounted for 6% of the revenue, while 16nm and 20nm node made up for 21% collectively. The vast majority 67% came from 28nm and below node process technologies.

TSMC forecasts that global semiconductor chip market would slightly edge up 1% year-on-year in 2019.

Predicting that foundry service market across the world would stay flat, the company bets that HPC, high-performance computing device market would keep growing up as the biggest contributor to its revenue growth over the next 5 years, as such data-intensive applications as AI, Big Data Analysis will be guzzling up tones of computing power.