Posted on Thursday, March 15 2012 @ 14:26 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Bright Side of News
heard rumors that NVIDIA has taped out its first trial run of Tegra chips at Samsung. Because the Common Platform Alliance (IBM, GlobalFoundries and Samsung) is switching to a "Gate Last" approach with the 20nm process, which is utilized by Intel and TSMC, this will make it easier for clients to switch back and forth between foundries.
Both Tegra 4 and Kepler are going to be built using the 28nm process at TSMC and the biggest worry for the company is the constrained supply. Nobody can get enough supply, and the battle is on between AMD, NVIDIA and Qualcomm are scraping for each available 28nm wafer.
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Once 20nm process matures AMD, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm and just about everybody else will be able to switch foundries from TSMC to Common Platform and back, which are what all companies need to battle Intel’s "transistor excellence".
Qualcomm already uses Common Platform through GlobalFoundries and it looks NVIDIA is joining the Common Platform through the small doors with Samsung. With AMD expanding from GlobalFoundries to TSMC, it looks like the foundry battle will seriously heat up at 20nm.
