Nvidia’s 12nm vs AMD’s 7nm GPU efficiency is “incomparable”
Despite AMD already launching its Radeon VII graphics card on the 7nm node, and promising mainstream 7nm AMD Navi GPUs before the end of September, Nvidia is still adamant it’s not going to switch just because everyone else is. During Nvidia’s recent Q1 earnings call Nvidia CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, explained he wants to do much more than just take an off-the-shelf process node and port its GPUs over... in what seems like a thinly veiled dig at AMD.
The current Turing GPUs are all based on the 12nm FinFET process, and there has been no official talk from the green team about when it might transition to all smaller transistor lithography or even what that might be. Nvidia has been announced as one of the launch partners for Samsung’s 7nm EUV process, which is set to go into volume production in 2020. That makes it the earliest likely timing for a new GPU architecture and a new node for Nvidia GPUs.
Though given that Jen-Hsun is still talking about working on node designs with TSMC, there is still the possibility that it’s adapting a 7nm process with the company's traditional pureplay foundry partner. “In terms of process nodes we tend to design our own process with TSMC,” explains Huang. “Buying an off-the-shelf process is something that we can surely do, but we want to do much more than that.”
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