14 DAY TRIAL // When Advanced Micro Devices broke most ties with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Companies, NVIDIA did not do the same. Now, though, the Santa Clara, California-based company is making a similar move as well.
TSMC has been the supplier of semiconductor chips for NVIDIA and AMD for many years, to the point where it has had a great control over when the two rivals were able to release new processors.
However, the foundry has shown difficulty in properly advancing to better fabrication nodes, or at least meeting the deadlines of its clients.
It started with 40nm yield issues back in 2010 and only got worse from there. Nanotechnology is a capricious mistress.
AMD decided to cut its losses in December 2014, turning to Globalfoundries for all future CPUs, APUs and GPUs. Now, NVIDIA has reportedly cut at least some of the ties with TSMC, turning instead to Samsung.
Samsung gets new 14nm clients
Samsung recently had a breakthrough in FinFET manufacturing technology and expects to be able to produce 14nm chips as soon as the second quarter of 2015. According to the new report, Qualcomm, Apple and NVIDIA have started to place orders.
At this point, it is hard to speculate on exactly what products NVIDIA has asked Samsung to manufacture, but it could just be a small batch of test chips for now.
The green-loving brand has already stated that its next GPUs will be designed on the TSMC 16FF+ process, something unlikely to change so late in the game.
Also, there is some animosity between Samsung and NVIDIA over the latter's patent infringement lawsuits. Not that the even bigger patent war between Samsung and Apple stopped the latter from ordering chips from the former, so we suppose business will go on as usual regardless.
NVIDIA has also stated that the Tegra X1 SoCs are made by TSMC as well, which is another point in the “NVIDIA is just testing its chances with Samsung for now” argument.
The products
We don't know what they will be, and we cannot even begin to guess. They could be GPUs, they could be 14nm versions of Tegra, perhaps a smaller, lower-performance version for phones and wearables. Tegra X1 is mighty at 1 TFLOP power, but that makes it unsuitable for most things besides non-gaming tablets.
