NVIDIA gives thumbs up to TSMC for providing the best transistors

Posted on Wednesday, May 10 2017 @ 11:25 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
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NVIDIA's first quarter earnings call was one big good news show and one interesting observation is that last quarter the non-gaming revenue was getting very close to making up half of the company's sales. As such, most of the attention was on NVIDIA's datacenter revenue so the earnings call didn't include a lot of snippets relevant to PC gamers.

One interesting snippet perhaps was a response to a question from an analyst about NVIDIA's technology roadmap and the intersection with process node development. Huang replied NVIDIA has never been obsessed about having the latest transistors, it's all about getting the best transistors. And he gave a thumbs up to TSMC for providing NVIDIA with the absolute best that they can get:
Hans Mosesmann - Rosenblatt Securities, Inc.
Thank you. Congratulations, guys. Hey, Jen-Hsun, can you give us like a state of the union on process node and technology roadmaps that you guys see? Intel made a pretty nice exposition of where they are in terms of their transistors and so on. So what's your comfort level as you see process technology and your roadmaps for new GPUs? Thank you.

Jen-Hsun Huang - NVIDIA Corp.
Yes. Hi, Hans. I think there are a couple of ways to think about it. First of all, we know that this is the – we know that some – the world calls it the end of Moore's Law, but it's really the end of two dynamics that has happened. And one dynamic of course is the end of processor architecture productive innovation, end of instruction-level parallelism advances. The second is the end of Dennard scaling. And the combination of those two things makes it look like it's the end of Moore's Law.

The easy way to think about that is that we can no longer rely – if we want to advance computing performance, we can no longer rely on transistor advances alone. That's one of the reasons why NVIDIA has never been obsessed about having the latest transistors. We want the best transistors. There's no question about it, but we don't need it to advance. And the reason for that is because we advance computing on such a multitude of levels, all the way from architecture, this architecture we call GPU accelerated computing, to the software stacks on top, to the algorithms on top, to the applications that we work with. We tune it across the top, from top to bottom all the way from bottom to top.

And so as a result, transistors is just one of the 10 things that we use. And like I said, it's really, really important to us. And I want the best, and TSMC provides us the absolute best that we can get, and we push along with them as hard as we can. But in the final analysis, it's one of the tools in the box.
Don't miss the GPU Technology Conference keynote later today
On a related note, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang will be hosting a keynote at the company's GPU Technology Conference later today. During yesterday's conference call, it was repeatedly mentioned the show would be quite exciting so perhaps it's worth a watch. Huang's keynote starts at 9.00 AM PST. There should be a livestream via GPU Tech Conference.


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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