Wednesday, March 15th 2017
NVIDIA to Build "Volta" Consumer GPUs on TSMC 12 nm Process
NVIDIA's next-generation "Volta" GPU architecture got its commercial debut in the most unlikely class of products, with the Xavier autonomous car processor. The actual money-spinners based on the architecture, consumer GPUs, will arrive some time in 2018. The company will be banking on its old faithful fab TSMC, to build those chips on a new 12 nanometer FinFET node that's currently under development. TSMC's current frontline process is the 16 nm FFC, which debuted in mid-2015, with mass-production following through in 2016. NVIDIA's "GP104" chip is built on this process.
This could also mean that NVIDIA could slug it out against AMD with its current GeForce GTX 10-series "Pascal" GPUs throughout 2017-18, even as AMD threatens to disrupt NVIDIA's sub-$500 lineup with its Radeon Vega series, scheduled for Q2-2017. NVIDIA's "Volta" architecture could see stacked DRAM technologies such as HBM2 gain more mainstream exposure, although competing memory standards such as GDDR6 aren't too far behind.
Sources:
Commercial Times (Taiwan), TechReport
This could also mean that NVIDIA could slug it out against AMD with its current GeForce GTX 10-series "Pascal" GPUs throughout 2017-18, even as AMD threatens to disrupt NVIDIA's sub-$500 lineup with its Radeon Vega series, scheduled for Q2-2017. NVIDIA's "Volta" architecture could see stacked DRAM technologies such as HBM2 gain more mainstream exposure, although competing memory standards such as GDDR6 aren't too far behind.
25 Comments on NVIDIA to Build "Volta" Consumer GPUs on TSMC 12 nm Process
It's actually counterproductive to potentially limit stock and incur other cost penalties to use cutting edge technologies first.
And how is NVIDIA going to manage 6 DRAM stacks on the interposer when AMD could barely fit four? Kind of suggests the GPU is relatively small which, in turn, suggests it is memory (as in compute) centric rather than graphics centric.
Have to wait and see.
At the same time, this is rumour about Volta being built on 12nm. I'm not sure how you infer from that that Volta is "just Pascal with an HBM2 controller and a tiny die shrink".
Nobody said HBM is not needed. Rather, for consumers it makes little difference other than cost in its current form.
It fits a pattern that started with Maxwell and the roadmap we had at that time. Nvidia is pushing architectural changes ahead of itself because the competition doesn't compete. I'm saying Volta will continue along that line.
HBM is more practical, and requires less space, less power and offers more bandwidth compared to GDDR. The downside of HBM1 was that it was only able to adress up to 4GB of videoram, while HBM2 does not have that limitation anymore (up to 16GB).
Since AMD had a role in developping that interposer, AMD will have an advantage over HBM and HBM2 chips in the future while Nvidia and others have to wait in line first.
This was an important deal and this is why you dont see nvidia HBM cards yet. The FuryX with HBM is still an excellent all-round graphics card if you ask me. The HBM 1 OC is also sick, from base 500Mhz up to 1GHz offering a stunning 1024GB a sec of memory bandwidth. You dont see numbers like that in the GDDR camp.