do fabrication processes mature?

[bigmike20vt]

Hi

just a random thought.......

if i had a founders edition 1080ti for instance which came out launch day
and if i picked up a brand new one today....

would it be likely that there would be any difference between the cards (out side of the normal silicon lottery)

ie do the odds of "winning" the silicon lottery increase on a more mature fabrication or does it really make not differences?

thanks

 

[D1craig]

are they made so far apart for this to even matter? i would have thought all the chips would be made within 3 months of each other and then they are on to perfecting the next model of chips?

but if they are made more than 6months apart they could have quite a difference. also depends if 1080ti shares chip space with titans doesnt it as they would get the better chips?

all assumptions.

 

[bigmike20vt]

are they made so far apart for this to even matter? i would have thought all the chips would be made within 3 months of each other and then they are on to perfecting the next model of chips?

really? i didnt know this... so my 1080ti which is on order now, the chip could well have been manufactured at the same time the launch chips were made?

well that is something i learned today

 

[Steampunk]

Fabs do get dialled in, but it's usually to improve yields. There may be some general improvements so that later on you have more chance of getting a good overclocker (because more of the chips are good rather than average or bad). It's not going to be anything vastly different, because that would come as part of a new product/design. As time goes on, the process gets better understood, so a product refresh on the same node will often have improvements in speed, overclocking, yields etc. and by then the fab is running as well as it can be to get maximum yields and quality out of the final product.

 

[d_brennen]

They run wafers through en mass, so while there is improvement, it's probably not that much.

There is a SMALL chance that NV even tweaked the process on later runs to get more candidate dies somehow resulting in LOWER max clock potential but make more meet minimum spec. Highly unlikely though.

Of course you can always get one that was in the binning pile and only just makes the grade

 

[bigmike20vt]

Thanks for the replies . Interesting stuff

 

[Rroff]

Generally a process needs to be very stable so designs work across a range of production and tweaks could easily stop stuff being made successfully but optimisations do happen over the lifetime of a process.

For instance 28nm got a tweak between the initial release of the 700 (Kepler) series cards and later ones with the B1 cards able to do quite a bit higher clocks nominally though the max overclocks possible wasn't hugely different but also around 5% more power efficient (The average overclock for A stepping cards was around 11xxMHz while the B1 cores would often boost to ~1200MHz out the box and overclock to around 1300MHz - but the "golden" cores for both revisions overclocked to about the same max).

Usually a significant tweak to the semi-conductor process comes with a revision or refresh of the GPU line-up such as the move from the GTX480 to GTX580.

 

[D.P.]

Yes, the process gets a little better typically but usually wont make a large difference to the GPU, however, the improvements in can allow for a revision of a GPU or to allow a new design with slightly increased density or improved power characteristics etc.
This is what the 12nm proces is really, but the pascal units couldn't take advantage of those improvements., it needed a redesign such as Volta or Turing. Pascal itslef on the 16nm process might clock ever so slightly better or pull 5-10w less at load etc.

 

[nashathedog]

Hi

just a random thought.......

if i had a founders edition 1080ti for instance which came out launch day
and if i picked up a brand new one today....

would it be likely that there would be any difference between the cards (out side of the normal silicon lottery)

ie do the odds of "winning" the silicon lottery increase on a more mature fabrication or does it really make not differences?

thanks

The RX 580 is a more mature RX480. I think XFX was getting the more mature chips early as they were used in the GTR XXX 480 Black Edition (I think).

The Kepler Gigabyte 780 GHZ edition was a more mature 780

The 7970 ghz edition is... I'm sure you can guess it