NVIDIA and TSMC about to ramp up production of 12nm Volta GPUs

TSMC reported it plans to kick off volume production of its 12nm FinFET node in the final quarter of this year. As I wrote earlier this year, this 12nm process from TSMC is basically an enhanced, next-generation version of the company's 16nm process. Tesla V100 datacenter cards from NVIDIA using the 12nm process are already shipping today in low volumes.

As NVIDIA revealed last week, there will be no Volta gaming GPUs until sometime in 2018. NVIDIA has been keeping very tight-lipped about its next-generation gaming GPUs but they could potentially arrive as early as Q1 2018.

We still don't know whether NVIDIA plans to launch Volta gaming GPUs first, or intends to launch a Pascal refresh as some rumors indicate. Given the underwhelming performance and power efficiency metrics of AMD's Vega, NVIDIA is unlikely to rush its Volta-based GeForce GTX cards to the market.