News – Nvidia Partners With Samsung for Next-Gen 7nm GPU Fabrication
Nvidia has partnered up with Samsung for the fabrication of its 7nm chips, according to a report from MyNavi.
Samsung kicked off risk production of 7nm silicon using EUV (extreme ultra-violet) lithography on October 18th, some two months ahead of its original early 2019 schedule. Taiwanese silicon foundry TSMC started risk production a little later, in October, prompting Nvidia to ink the deal with Samsung.
AMD is already making big headway with its 7nm Zen 2 and Navi chips but it looks as if Nvidia won’t be too far behind. It’s looking likely that the Turing architecture will be the last 12nm FinFET chips Nvidia will use, switching to 7nm for its next-gen graphics cards.
Based upon Samsung’s technology roadmap, sampling will be reading in late 2019, while we’re looking at mass availability at some point in 2020, giving us an indicator of when we can expect to see Nvidia’s successor to Turing. It should allow for a little more time for the 7nm process to mature when compared to AMD who are steamrolling ahead with the new technology.
On their part, Nvidia has been largely silent on what’s going to succeed Turing. That comes as little surprise as it’s a little preoccupied with getting its current RTX 20 series GPUs into gamers’ hands. This coming year is almost certainly going to be all about Turing, including the possibility of some lower-priced GTX variants before things heat up once again in 2020.
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