So back to Nvidia and Pascal, assuming these manifests are for Pascal related tools. What does it mean? Does it mean Nvidia unquestionably has Pascal silicon? Nope, it means Nvidia unquestionably does not have Pascal silicon and probably wouldn’t for at best several days after they got these tools in-house. In short these tools shipping pretty much prove that Nvidia was anticipating Pascal early silicon, and not an enthusiast part, as the last few days of 2015 passed. If you assume a day to ship these parts from Taiwan to Bangalore, a few days to set it up, and a few more to test and prep, and a few more just in case something goes wrong, there is no way Nvidia had Pascal silicon when Jen-Hsun claimed they did, and he had to have known it.
It also proves the ‘reports’ of Pascal taping out in June were unquestionably wrong, if it taped out in June there is no way silicon would be getting back to Nvidia in early January, best case. ~7 months is enough for a full production wafer to go through TSMC, a month of debug, and another full production run after that. If you hot lot the silicon as they most assuredly did, there would be room for 3-4 full cycles, more than any GPU in recent memory bar Fermi needed. They would have shown it off months before AMD showed running Polaris’ in early December.
So dozens of sites all echoed the June tapeout date, and since it was on so many sites it was definitely true, only it really wasn’t. Pascal likely taped out in early November and wasn’t back from the fabs when Jen-Hsun gave his CES speech, at least that is what the data shows. The only thing the tapeout story really proved is none of the dozens of tech sites has any real sources and will all copy from anyone without bothering to so much as verify a fact. It isn’t news or journalism, it is plagiarism in a socially accepted form. And it is wrong.
The same happened with the Zauba manifests, again assuming they are for Pascal. These manifests unquestionably prove that there is no Pascal silicon in hand, not that Nvidia would be insane enough to ship such valuable parts via commercial cargo anyway, they prove that it didn’t exist at the time of shipping. Once again if the dozens of sites that reported Pascal silicon arrival had any technical knowledge, any sources, or even the most basic urge to do their jobs and verify the data, they would have known it was false. Literally no site other than SemiAccurate did this, they just copied from the nearest source and posted it as fact. And they were once again all wrong.
This is the sad state of technical ‘journalism’ and ‘news’, no sources, no checking, just copying. A random post on a forum with questionable validity turns into dozens or hundreds of articles, all of which were wrong. If any of the people involved had any sort of technical knowledge, or even read the data they were writing ‘facts’ about, they would know it was wrong. Now do you see why my head hurt?