Tuesday, October 13th 2020
NVIDIA Reportedly Moving Ampere to 7 nm TSMC in 2021
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. There would likely be need for some changes in the power delivery designs, there are a range of new quality assurance tests that have to be taken for the new silicon, and NVIDIA would set itself up for legal troubles should they just silently update the manufacturing process on high-end models - not only would early adopters be understandably miffed about their product having evolved over time, as there could be some claims regarding 8 nm-based models being bought after the 7 nm ones are launched. And if NVIDIA were to put a sticker on retail boxes updating the 8 nm to 7 nm, well, then any user could just decline to purchase any 8 nm cards, and only look for the 7 nm versions, which might leave NVIDIA with a real immovable supply problem.
No. If this report checks out, NVIDIA will likely launch the newly produced top-end Ampere cards (we're thinking RTX 3090, RTX 3080 and RTX 3070) in 7 nm Super versions, taking a page from their RTX 20-series book. The introduction of a higher-performing product built in 7 nm within a whole new series would protect NVIDIA from legal troubles while allowing them to publicly announce the transition. This would keep early adopters "happy" in the respect that this is a whole new product launch - users would receive that much better than by feeling that they were beta testers for NVIDIA's tango with Samsung, as reception for the 20-series Super cards shows. The usage of this new process would also allow NVIDIA to improve performance further over the original 30-series cards, due to lower leakage and higher potential operational frequencies - perhaps in addition to NVIDIA's 20-series strategy of trickling down bigger GPU designs.
Source:
DigiTimes
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.
No. If this report checks out, NVIDIA will likely launch the newly produced top-end Ampere cards (we're thinking RTX 3090, RTX 3080 and RTX 3070) in 7 nm Super versions, taking a page from their RTX 20-series book. The introduction of a higher-performing product built in 7 nm within a whole new series would protect NVIDIA from legal troubles while allowing them to publicly announce the transition. This would keep early adopters "happy" in the respect that this is a whole new product launch - users would receive that much better than by feeling that they were beta testers for NVIDIA's tango with Samsung, as reception for the 20-series Super cards shows. The usage of this new process would also allow NVIDIA to improve performance further over the original 30-series cards, due to lower leakage and higher potential operational frequencies - perhaps in addition to NVIDIA's 20-series strategy of trickling down bigger GPU designs.
120 Comments on NVIDIA Reportedly Moving Ampere to 7 nm TSMC in 2021
Yes 30% Einstein, it doesn't take a physicist to work out this is the ballpark we'd land in if the 3080 was on TSMC instead of Samsung's poor 8nm. In fact, rumour has it there were engineering samples of Ampere cards using TSMCs process node. I looked at some of the figures and let's just put it this way; they weren't worse than what we ended up getting from Nvidia in end.
Maybe I missed something, its an honest question... but I thought the gap from 14nm to 7nm is pretty substantial.Please share them, I'm genuinely interested.Exactly. The other way around is utterly shite.
What matters far more in the discussion about switching from Samsung to TSMC isn't really the name of the node but how efficient it is.
Samsung's 8nm let Nvidia build GA-102 with 50% more transistors than TU-102 but it used 50% more power too, making it roughly on par with TSMC's 2017 12FFN process, almost four years behind the curve - not exactly something you want in your flagship product.
I'm not 100% sure which of TSMC's nodes RDNA2 and Zen3 are being made on. N7P (or LP) is the new normal 7nm from TSMC - it's a tweaked process that clocks a bit higher than the original N7 process that Radeon VII and Zen2 launched on, but it's the same size, density and of comparable efficiency. N7FF+ (often written as 7nm+) is the EUV lithography that comes with a ~20% transistor density improvement and supposedly a 4.5% efficiency increase going by TSMC's own figures.
AMD has yet to launch, and it has yet to be worse than Turing. You are again, playing with yourself. Have fun with that.
ZEN3 is on the same 7nm DUV node that ZEN2 is. Not 7NP that is also enhanced DUV.
Clocks have gone up a little but gone up (wait to see all-core clocks), and that was from refined architecture and maybe the more mature 7nm DUV node. Also performance/watt gone up for the same reasons, but not from 7NP DUV because 5000 is not on 7NP DUV.
RDNA2 GPUs are on 7NP DUV. No 7+ EUV for any AMD products.
That was an honest mistake I want to believe...
And yes the only thing that Samsungs’s 8nm hurt on Ampere was the performance/watt. Clock crashes was/are probably due to lack of time to refine vBIOS, drivers, and time to test properly... so AIBs did some rush moves with the combination of all previous and the selected power delivery components.
and about 7nm capacity as i said in my other post even if AMD have some priority over others by TSMC they cannot take everything for themselves. remember nvidia is not the only one that need 7nm capacity. there is also others. TSMC cannot burn the bridge they had with other chip maker just so they can satisfy AMD alone. and news piece from Digitimes (which the basis of this article) saying TSMC is becoming more "friendly" towards nvidia. meaning they want nvidia to fab their stuff with them.
nVidia has gone with Samsung because it was cheaper node. Ampere card are so expensive that they cut corners wherever the could. They need this to be price competitive against AMD and get their profit margin. Against perf/watt.
Look how great Turing and Ampere is compared to past nVidia gens.
Thats ok. I can say it
Still performance uplift from previous gen for Turing and Ampere is the worst the last decade.
Performance per for watt for Turing and Ampere is the worst the last decade
Turing was so bad at everything that makes Ampere and particularly 3080 looking good.
It was my bad to not provide the narrative...
Watch it and listen before you can decide whats fits in what.
Anyway, im done giving views to pot stirring fanboy aimed rumorville channels, hope you keep enjoying top tier influence like that, i won't.
Off to my tinfoil hat wearing sessions.
You dont know what you're talkin about and and that is at least misleading
He is just telling things as is and for all brands
Offtopic:
I wonder how you are watching that 27" monitor without a display output.
Hopper won't be for consumers and it won't be for 2 years as of September.
I mean, what is a fanboy without some self-fulfilling conspiracy which I have...
I've been having these conspiracies for quite some time now. Doesn't matter any more whether it is a joke now that it is real, is it?