It is mere weeks until NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang presents the GTC 2020 keynote on May 14th. Information regarding the company’s upcoming Ampere and Hopper GPUs has come forth. Ampere is the official name given for this high-performance computing GPU aimed at data centers. Chinese website ChinaTimes has reported on NVIDIA’s potential sourcing for those next launches. According to their reporting, Ampere will be made using TSMC’s 7nm process. Jensen Huang had also stated as such back in December.
ChinaTimes also alluded to another upcoming GPU from NVIDIA. Ampere’s successor, Hopper, was also mentioned. Hopper is rumored to use multi-chip modules (MCM). In its story, it mentions that Samsung has begun mass production of its new 5 nm node using extreme ultraviolet lithography process (EUV). It continues by adding that Samsung has received orders, while guessing that NVIDIA is a customer. This, too, was at least in part confirmed by Jensen Huang back in December. He had said that TSMC would receive the majority of orders, with Samsung receiving some as well. However, it should be noted that TSMC has its own EUV process. In October, TSMC began mass production of its new N7+ line.
One takeaway from all this is that EUV lithography will be playing a major role in upcoming node fabrication. This new process that both chip manufacturers are using holds promising expectations. It will hopefully increase production capacity while improving upon chip scaling. Samsung also recently sent out its first shipment of DRAM utilizing EUV.