More exciting news? Well, a move to 7nm technology would mean better power savings and management for Nvidia Ampere RTX-30 series of graphic cards. Let’s wait see if this will help with Nvidia’s current RTX 3080/3090 power issues.
Taken from TPU … A report straight from DigiTimes claims that NVIDIA is looking to upgrade their Ampere consumer GPUs from Samsung’s 8 nm to TSMC’s 7 nm. According to the source, the volume of this transition should be “very large”, but most likely wouldn’t reflect the entirety of Ampere’s consumer-facing product stack. The report claims that TSMC has become more “friendly” to NVIDIA. This could be because TSMC now has available manufacturing capacity in 7 nm due to some of its clients moving to the company’s 5 nm node, or simply because TSMC hadn’t believed NVIDIA to consider Samsung as a viable foundry alternative – which it now does – and has thus lowered pricing.
There are various reasons being leveraged at this, none with substantial grounds other than “reported from industry sources”. NVIDIA looking for better yields is one of the appointed reasons, as is its history as a TSMC customer. NVIDIA shouldn’t have too high a cost porting its manufacturing to TSMC in terms of design changes to the silicon level so as to cater to different characteristics of TSMC’s 7 nm, because the company’s GA100 GPU (Ampere for the non-consumer market) is already manufactured at TSMC. The next part of this post is mere (relatively informed) speculation, so take that with a saltier disposition than what came before.
That NVIDIA is looking to tier its manufacturing process across high-end and the rest of its product stack (with 7 nm for high-end and 8 nm for the rest of it) would become a headache for themselves and for consumers, should NVIDIA just have two suppliers for the same graphics products.
Read the rest at TPU
Source: DigiTimes
