Posted on Friday, February 18 2011 @ 15:31 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang told investors during this week's conference call that TSMC won't be able to provide enough 28nm volume to support a high-scale launch of the Tegra 3 "Kal El" SoC in 2011. Therefore, the chip will stick with the 40nm process in order to guarantee a quicker launch.
"28nm is not available this year, not until the very end of the year. I think, for us to ship [Tegra "Kal El"] production out in Q3, we have to start wafers in early Q2, right? So, 28nm is not an option. Secondly, 40nm is now in the third year of its production, and the yields are fabulous. [...] So 40nm process technology is absolutely the right approach. It is the most mature, and we can go into very high [volume] production very quickly because the yields are so great," said Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia, during a conference call with financial analysts.
Tegra "Kal El" system-on-chip is based on four Cortex-A9 application cores, will feature a GeForce graphics processor with twelve stream processors and will have a new display and video engines capable of supporting Blu-ray disc video playback and stereo-3D graphics output. Other capabilities, clock-speeds, power consumption and die size of the novelty are not known previously.
Source: X-bit Labs.
