NVIDIA says it ramped world's first HBM2

Posted on Friday, August 12 2016 @ 11:54 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
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Speaking to a financial analyst during the company's quarterly earnings call, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang talked a bit evasively about the yields of the 16nm Pascal GPU but one of the interesting things he mentioned is that NVIDIA ramped world's first HBM2 and 3D memory stacking:
Mark Lipacis - Jefferies LLC
That's very helpful. Thank you. And then last question. On the new – so you're just starting to ship Pascal now, and I guess my understanding is that, historically, as you're shipping the new product, the yields have opportunity for improvement and the more volume is shipped, the more you climb down the yield curve. What classically happens here on the yield, and does that positively impact gross margins over the next three or four quarters? Thank you.

Jen-Hsun Huang - Co-Founder, President, CEO & Director
Yeah. So we've talked extensively about the way we prepare for new process nodes over the last several years. For long-term NVIDIA followers, you might have recalled that 40-nanometer was a very challenging node for us. And then with all of these challenges it's an opportunity for us to improve our company, and we've implemented a very rigorous process node preparation methodology, and it starts, of course, with some of the world's best process design engineers, circuit design engineers and process readiness teams. And we have a fantastic group dedicated to just getting process ready for us.

And the second part of it is just how that process readiness is integrated throughout the entire company. And so I'm really proud of the way that the company executed on Pascal. 16-nanometer FinFET is no trivial task, not to mention the speed of the memories that we used. It's the world's first GDDR5X. We also ramped the world's first HBM2 memory and 3D memory stacking. So the number of technological challenges that we overcame in the ramp of Pascal is quite extraordinary. I'm super proud of the team. Now, going forward, we're going to continue to refine yields, and that is absolutely the case. However, we came into 16-nanometer with a great deal of preparedness, and so it's too early to guess what's going to happen to yields and margins long term, but we'll guide one quarter at a time.


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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