Posted on Wednesday, September 16 2015 @ 12:40 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
The rumor mill claims Samsung failed to win the contract to manufacture NVIDIA's future Pascal GPU. BusinessKorea
reports NVIDIA will continue to use TSMC as the exclusive partner for Pascal, which will be manufactured on a 16nm FinFET process.
According to industry sources on Sept. 15, Nvidia decided to let TSMC mass produce the Pascal GPU, which is scheduled to be released next year, using the production process of 16-nm FinFETs. Some in the industry predicted that both Samsung and TSMC would mass produce the Pascal GPU, but the U.S. firm chose only the Taiwanese firm in the end. Since the two foundries have different manufacturing process of 16-nm FinFETs, the U.S. tech company selected the world's largest foundry for product consistency.
TSMC has been NVIDIA's partner for 20 years, the site claims Samsung was keen on winning this contract but failed to obtain it due to a lack of foundry experience. Samsung's 14nm FinFET process is very similar to TSMC's 16nm FinFET and it seems NVIDIA didn't want to leave its long-term partner into the cold by taking a gamble on Samsung.
