Wednesday, March 23rd 2022
NVIDIA Could Use Intel's Foundry Service for Chip Manufacturing
Yesterday, NVIDIA announced its next-generation Hopper architecture designed for data center applications and workloads. There is always a question of availability, as the previous period showed everyone that the supply chain is overbooked and semiconductors are in very high demand. During the Q&A press session today, NVIDIA's CEO, Jensen Huang, tried to answer as many questions as possible. However, an exciting topic arose regarding the potential collaboration with Intel. As a part of Intel's IDM 2.0 strategy, the company plans to offer its chip manufacturing capabilities to the third-party companies willing to make efforts and port their designs to Intel's semiconductor nodes. NVIDIA, one of the largest TSMC customers, could be a new Intel customer. Below, we compiled a few quotes that highlight Jensen Huang's opinions, taking the quotes from Tom's Hardware.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
NVIDIA CEO Jensen HuangOur strategy is to expand our supply base with diversity and redundancy at every single layer. At the chip layer, at the substrate layer, the system layer, at every single layer. We've diversified the number of nodes, we've diversified the number of foundries, and Intel is an excellent partner of ours[…]. They're interested in us using their foundries, and we're very interested in exploring it. [...] I am encouraged by the work that is done at Intel, I think this is a direction they have to go, and we're interested in looking at their process technology. Our relationship with Intel is quite long; we work with them across a whole lot of different areas, every single PC, every single laptop, every single PC, supercomputer, we collaborate. [...] We have been working closely with Intel, sharing with them our roadmap long before we share it with the public, for years. Intel has known our secrets for years. AMD has known our secrets for years. We are sophisticated and mature enough to realize that we have to collaborate.[...] We share roadmaps, of course, under confidentiality and a very selective channel of communications. The industry has just learned how to work in that way.In addition, he also noted that talking about collaborating with different foundries is not as easy, as separate plans and business models have to align to get a successful contract/deal. They can take a lot of time to get on the proper grounds; however, they can get it going if there is a desire to work.
13 Comments on NVIDIA Could Use Intel's Foundry Service for Chip Manufacturing
I think it would be a shame if Intel made Nvidia GPU kick TSMC made Intel GPU...
Nvidia uses a lot of Samsung 8nm, which does seem to be considerably below the competing nodes from Intel(10nm/Intel 7) and TSMC and they could try using Intel nodes for something like their Orin SoC.
RTX 5090+
RTX 5090++
:p
At the end of the day, I do wonder if these aggressive foundry expansion will work in the longer run, bearing in mind the resources required by the foundries are still going to be limited to the same players. The latest news about limitation with ASML to produce enough lithography machines is one of the many examples.
I think a different problem that may happen is over capacity which will drive prices down and kill a lot of the margins manufacturers are currently enjoying - it's great in the short term but as much as we want cheap stuff it's not really sustainable
The same thing was true when intel was in the lead, it's was not something that would last forever. Intel could be ahead of TSMC in the future. Or maybe just be really competitive.
Time will tell.