Sunday, April 20th 2014
NVIDIA GM204 and GM206 to Tape-Out in April, Products to Launch in Q4?
It looks like things are going horribly wrong at TSMC, NVIDIA and AMD's principal foundry partner, with its 20 nm manufacturing process, which is throwing a wrench into the works at NVIDIA, forcing it to re-engineer an entire lineup of "Maxwell" GPUs based on existing 28 nm process. Either that, or NVIDIA is confident of delivering an efficiency leap using Maxwell on existing/mature 28 nm process, and saving costs in the process. NVIDIA is probably drawing comfort from the excellent energy-efficiency demonstrated by its Maxwell-based GeForce GTX 750 series. According to a 3DCenter.org report, NVIDIA's next mainline GPUs, the GM204 and GM206, which will be built on the 28 nm process, and "Maxwell" architecture, will tape out later this month. Products based on the two, however, can't be expected before Q4 2014, as late as December, or even as late as January 2015.
GM204 succeeds GK104 as the company's next workhorse performance-segment silicon, which could power graphics card SKUs ranging all the way from US $250 to $500. An older report suggests that it could feature as many as 3,200 CUDA cores. The GM204 could be taped out in April 2014, and the first GeForce products based on it could launch no sooner than December 2014. The GM206 is the company's next mid-range silicon, which succeeds GK106. It will tape out in April, alongside the GM204, but products based on it will launch only in January 2015. The GM200 is a different beast altogether. There's no mention of which process the chip will be based on, but it will succeed the GK110, and should offer performance increments worthy of being a successor. For that, it has to be based on the 20 nm process. It will tape-out in June 2014, and products based on it will launch only in or after Q2 2015.
Source:
3DCenter.org
GM204 succeeds GK104 as the company's next workhorse performance-segment silicon, which could power graphics card SKUs ranging all the way from US $250 to $500. An older report suggests that it could feature as many as 3,200 CUDA cores. The GM204 could be taped out in April 2014, and the first GeForce products based on it could launch no sooner than December 2014. The GM206 is the company's next mid-range silicon, which succeeds GK106. It will tape out in April, alongside the GM204, but products based on it will launch only in January 2015. The GM200 is a different beast altogether. There's no mention of which process the chip will be based on, but it will succeed the GK110, and should offer performance increments worthy of being a successor. For that, it has to be based on the 20 nm process. It will tape-out in June 2014, and products based on it will launch only in or after Q2 2015.
51 Comments on NVIDIA GM204 and GM206 to Tape-Out in April, Products to Launch in Q4?
what's going to be released this year ? This article is not making sense -_-
and TSMc can go *** themselves
NVIDIA should look for a new partner because this is ridiculous :D
please go look agian at the 750 ti
and comment back with the correct results :)
GM107 -> 60 Watts
GK104 -> 230 Watts
GM106 -> 150 Watts
GK110 = GM104
If the GM204 is an analogue of the previous 104 boards then FP64 will be culled. It was 1:12 in the GF104/104, and 1:24 in GK104. Keeping the FP64 ability at a nominal level would also protect Nvidia's margins on existing Titan/K6000/K20/K40 product lines- and more appropriately, keep them relevant since there's no way Nvidia make a GK 110 replacement on 28nm - which means holding out for the 16nm FinFET node (20nm BEOL+16nm FEOL) for a successor.
GM106 => 1/4th
GM104 => 1/2th
GM200 => Full DP.
The future is compute shading which will be reliant on 64-bit maths.
So, if the tape out hadn't happened at that stage, it left 15 days in the month for it to happen at that stage....assuming tape out hadn't already occurred- then you're in the realms of trying to disprove a negative.
It actually makes a lot of sense for all parties, Intel needs more of a reason than its own chips to really push forward with 14nm and for nVidia and AMD its a highly advanced and relatively mature/tested process.
Win, freakin win baby!
Edit: AMD too will stick to v28 NM this year.:(
The transistors / chips for CPUs and for GPUs are done in a different way to cater to the ways each of these kinds of ICs work.
As a very good example to illustrate this, IF You know / remember, this was a major hindrance for AMD when they made their latest APUs to keep the GPU part good – using a process meant for CPUs would have non-trivially harmed the performance of the GPU side and vice versa. So they had to compromise. Which is also the reason why the CPU part on their latest APUs don't OC as good any more, compared to their previous APUs.
So yeah, using Intel's fabs for those GPUs could mean actually worse performance and power efficiency despite being 14nm.
Back when people were a little more confident of EUV's ramp - a year or more ago, people might have seen a business as usual scenario, but ASML's delays in wafer and validation tooling (which caused an influx of funding from their customers), as well as TSMC's own well publicised false start recentlyhave certainly stopped any talk of the continuation of transistor density per dollar.