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Nvidia tacitly confirms TSMC 16nm usage

Orangey

Orangey

Orangey

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http://www.kitguru.net/components/g...will-remain-a-very-important-foundry-partner/

Recent market rumours suggested that Nvidia plans to use manufacturing capacities of Samsung Electronics or GlobalFoundries to produce some of its multimedia or graphics processors in the future. When asked about this during a conference call with investors and financial analysts this week, Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia, neither confirmed nor denied the plan, but he clearly stated that TSMC will remain the strategic manufacturing partner of the company.

“We always look at all foundries, and TSMC remains our most strategic [partner],” said Mr. Huang. “They are going to continue to be a very important partner for us for the foreseeable future.”

Recently TSMC confirmed that it would only start to produce chips using 16nm FinFET process technology in the third quarter of the year, considerably later than Samsung Electronics and even GlobalFoundries. Moreover, given than many fabless chip designers are not confident of manufacturing capacities and yields of products made using various FinFET manufacturing processes, numerous developers create chips for different contract makers of semiconductors so to ensure stable supply.

During the conference call Nvidia revealed nothing new about its future products and fabrication processes it is going to use, but said that test chips produced using TSMC’s 16nm FinFET manufacturing technology met its criteria.

“TSMC is a fabulous supplier, […] their FinFET technology is excellent,” said the CEO of Nvidia. “[We have been] working with TSMC on FinFET now for a couple of years, and so we have quite a bit of confidence in their ability to deliver amazing FinFET transistors.”
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What is interesting here is the high praise for TSMC's 16FF, it has been the subject of some derision due to being built on top of 20nm which failed badly. Now that Jensen has said his piece all that's left is to wait. TSMC will surely deliver. (insert skeleton pics here)
 
Hmmmmm, interesting! Looks like full-fat Maxwell is at *least* a year away from retail release. They did well to foresee and modify the Maxwell design to 28nm to compensate for the wait...
 
During the conference call Nvidia revealed nothing new about its future products and fabrication processes it is going to use
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If NVidia said nothing new about anything then why did they bother with this article. ( nothing wrong with you posting it Orangey :))

You have to love internet journalism don't you.
 
They posted it because of the rumours about NV leaving TSMC, if you think back to the slide they made panning 20nm wafer cost it has been building a while.
 
So nvidia's next set of chips are definitely going to be 16nm? Good stuff. Can anyone with knowledge on the matter explain to me how much of a performance increase we can expect to see going from 20nm to 16nm. Is it simply 25%? (i.e. 20/16-1).
 
Not wanting to go off topic too much but does anyone have a proper idiots guide to the production of chips for GPU's and CPU's? I'd just like to have some sort understanding about yields and why not all chips are equal etc etc.

Thanks
 
Jeezus, just confirms we're about a year away from anything properly decent.. I mean GM200 / 390X will be good but very expensive (Especially GM200) and just as power hungry as other 28nm cards..

Meh, wake me up in 2016 :D
 
Boomstick777 said:
Jeezus, just confirms we're about a year away from anything properly decent.. I mean GM200 / 390X will be good but very expensive (Especially GM200) and just as power hungry as other 28nm cards..

Meh, wake me up in 2016 :D
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I do agree, gpu market is basically stagnant and other then perhaps the 390x i dont see any real affordable upgrades for the average users
 
setter said:
Now that is what you call value for money. Not too often we can say that a gpu can remain competitive for so long.
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True that. I only turned on the other one last night, as SLI has been sweet as, in all my games and thought I would run a 3 card run on Kaap's TR bench. 1440P and SLI Titans is more than enough (same as your 780s in fairness). I will be happy to retire them for a decent upgrade but they would be missed. Best cards I have ever owned.
 
JediFragger said:
Hmmmmm, interesting! Looks like full-fat Maxwell is at *least* a year away from retail release. They did well to foresee and modify the Maxwell design to 28nm to compensate for the wait...
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There is the possibility of a scaled up semi-skinned maxwell (ie not the DP compute monster) to the maximum economically viable die size. They have had the time to plan and execute. Then they arrive later with pascal/fat dp pascal on 16nm finfet some time 2016.
 
So daft that people are using longevity to say Titan is good value. If Titan was priced at £500, it would be still be better value regardless of how long you use the card for.

What determines the price is cost of chip, cost of pcb, cost of parts and then the amount they want to screw you. It's a 550mm^2 chip or there abouts(forget if they went bigger of smaller this gen, it's in the ball park). Even with significantly worse yields than the ball park 300mm^2 and 360mm^2 680/7970 it did absolutely not cost anywhere near three times as much to make thus Nvidia decided to take their customers to the cleaners on the price... confirmed precisely when they launched cheaper alternatives and tanked the price on it.

The other main thing is, what does a new gen do, it comes along and forces old card pricing down. However, the 780/780ti and 290x all forced prices down. They might not be new gen or double the performance but they still caused Titan prices to drop, thus the value of the product dropped fast anyway.
 
drunkenmaster said:
So daft that people are using longevity to say Titan is good value. snip
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To me, the Titan has been excellent value. I bought 2 on release and have added a third and they have been fantastic. I used 2 at 4K and they were the only cards that had enough VRAM to cope whilst having the grunt when I bought them.

I can sell them for over £500 each if I wanted right now, so that would be a loss of £327 on each card. (2 cards).

Now show me what other cards were released to play big resolutions and have the VRAM to cope and still has a good resale value back in Feb 2013?

So daft that people can't see the big picture and have to reel off stupid comments like that.
 
whyscotty said:
Glad I was daft enough to buy 3 on release :D
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I really thought about sticking them on the bay and buying a cheap card to wait it out but then I thought how good they have been and how quickly I change my mind on what I want, I decided I will hang onto them :D

Do I want a 4K G-Sync sceen? - Check
Do I want to get an Occulus Rift? - check
Do I want to get the 390X if it does have more than 4GB VRAM? - check
Do I want to go small case and low powered? - Check

plus add a ton more there and all of these things run through my head when I look to the future :D
 
I want a gsync monitor first and foremost. But life throws a spanner in the works, work dried up a bit lately so not much money coming in. The cash I had saved is now tiding me over until things pick up again. Just my luck lol.
 
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