Reports say NVIDIA's next-generation graphics chips are moving to samsung

June 4, 2008 -- according to Digitimes, TSMC has maintained its leading edge in advanced manufacturing technology, and the 7nm process has won orders from major manufacturers. Samsung has decided to skip the 7nm process and go directly to the 7nm LPP EVU process.Digitimes said NVIDIA is reportedly embracing samsung again, with the expected 2020 launch of the Ampere graphics chip using samsung's 7nm EUV process.

Research suggests that samsung semiconductor practitioners 7 nm EUV process yield is unclear, closely associated with TSMC NVIDIA has turned to samsung, is perhaps the main cause has been off the orbit in process planning, six months ago missed the opportunity to order 7 nm TSMC process, now TSMC has enough orders, plus 7 nm EUV process price is expensive, so in the face of samsung foundry cheap price, NVIDIA decided to embrace the samsung.

It is reported that AMD's recent series of 7nm orders fully embrace TSMC, quickly filled the capacity gap of TSMC.There is no NVIDIA in the contract manufacturing list of TSMC 7nm and 7nm EUV. It is confirmed that NVIDIA has turned to samsung.

At present, NVIDIA Turing architecture chip system all USES TSMC 12nm FFN manufacturing process, has been NVIDIA CEO huang renxun has shown the close cooperation with TSMC, huang renxun himself and TSMC founder zhang zhongmou friendship is also very deep.

According to the latest samsung previously disclosed process planning, samsung had decided to skip 7 nm process, directly on 7 nm LPP EUV process, at the beginning of 2019 has begun using the technology of mass production 7 nm products, and shipped in April, and 6 nm process production deal with big customers, design has been completed and is expected the second half of the 2019 into mass production, now also completed 5 nm process research and development.

To attract a customer order, samsung also offering a number of selling point, if the customer can use samsung technology, reduce the mask use quantity and provide process selection, for customers to reduce costs and shorten the product development process and time, samsung has released "samsung advanced foundry ecosystem" (SAFE), to provide a powerful design 5 nm process architecture.In addition to its own phones, samsung currently only has orders for 7nm EUV processors from IBM Power series.

Came the NVIDIA has become a samsung 7 nm EUV process large customers, this is samsung part prototypes in 2012 chip OEM orders and after chip orders and TSMC share Pascal architecture (samsung to 14 nm process OEM GTX 1050 GTX 1050) and wu Ti, again for NVIDIA regression, it was not clear whether with TSMC undertake together, but with the NVIDIA order, at least can attract other companies consider adopting.

Industry insiders said that NVIDIA should have decided to embrace samsung as early as six months ago, mainly because TSMC is already saturated with 7nm process orders, and TSMC is not willing to reduce the price of 7nm and 7nm EUV, and samsung offers extremely attractive OEM price, so NVIDIA chose samsung.

On the other hand, the mining tide makes the GPU market out of balance, and the shipment scale of NVIDIA declines and orders shrink obviously. Now, NVIDIA has little room for negotiation with TSMC in terms of supply and bargaining, which is the key to returning to samsung.