In the business of High End GPUs, we have AMD and Nvidia. But delivering more performance to the customer comes at a cost. The technology needs to evolve every couple of years, bringing the chips engravement from 20nm to 16nm for the last generations of GPUs. Originally planned for Q1 2015, TSMC production of Maxwell GM200 has been pushed back to Q2 or Q3 2015 by the chip manufacturing company because of their too optimistic schedule.
The Maxwell GM200, the chip you can expect to see on high end video card like the upcoming Titan II and the GTX 980 Ti, originally planned for mass production for early next year seems to be far from ready. After a first set back in their original plans, pushing the mass production of 16nm engraved chips to the second quarter of 2015, TSMC, Nvidia and Apple chipmaker, is reviewing once more its schedule.
To match its new production demands regarding the ‘holy’ 16nm chips, the manufacturer had to see bigger. For that purpose, a new team has been recruited and new equipment has been purchased to face the increasing demand. As you can see here, TSMC did not skimp on resources to satisfy its clients, effectively spending NT$1.4 billion of new equipments.
And the GM200 is not the only GPU Nvidia wanted to introduce with the 16nm chips, a new version of their flagship, the GM204 currently available on the GTX 970 and GTX 980 graphic cards, was also on the way. And that’s going to be delayed too. A rumored GM206 could be delayed to because of that setback.
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But a customer like you and me can ask himself: ‘what’s with all the fuzz about that 16nm thing?’. To reply to that, we will first need to see the benefits of such a new chip engravement method. And they are not anecdotal: gain in performance, decrease on power consumption for exemple. Everything you would want from your next graphic card. So this postpone chip can very well affect us by delaying release of new monster graphic cards from 3 to 6 months. And that’s an eternity in the hardware industry.
Thankfully for Nvidia, the company is not in any danger thanks to the record sales for this year, putting the revenue to $1.225 billion, up 16% from last year $1.05 billion.
Were you one of the Nvidia customers this year? Share with us your insights in their new GPUs in the comment section down below!