Despite chatter of NVIDIA looking at Samsung’s 5 nm EUV offering, sources with DigiTimes (paywall) claim that team green has put most of its bets on the world’s leading semiconductor foundry. TSMC has reportedly obtained major orders for NVIDIA’s next-generation 7 nm and 5 nm GPUs, which are rumored to be Ampere and Hopper, respectively. These would presumably include the heavily anticipated GeForce RTX 3000 SKUs.
“Anonymous sources have whispered to DigiTimes that NVIDIA is tapping Samsung to produce lower-end Ampere graphics cards,” added Tom’s Hardware, which saw the full report. “By doing this, NVIDIA could effectively lessen the load on TSMC and maximize the yields from both foundries.”
“It’s currently speculated that low-end Ampere products could leverage Samsung’s 7 nm EUV or 8 nm process nodes. Samsung seemingly transitioned to the newer and improved 5 nm EUV manufacturing process in the second quarter of this year, DigiTimes said. Its sources also claimed that NVIDIA and Samsung are in negotiations as to whether the latter can get a small piece of NVIDIA’s 5 nm orders.”
We should learn a lot more about Ampere via NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s GTC 2020 keynote, which will be available on YouTube on May 14. A recent filing for an Ampere-based DGX AI workstation would suggest that the architecture is just around the corner.