Comment by ak217 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ak217 | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting. Those really are pretty stunning words for a business relationship as big as this. If I understand correctly, Nvidia has nowhere else to go since TSMC is so far ahead of other independent foundries (I'm not sure how independent GF really is - is it conceivable for Nvidia to work with GF?) and it can't very well go to Intel given the amount of competition they are engaged in. Maybe Samsung?

Also, I'm not clear on the arguments presented in the slides. The transistor normalized price curves for 20nm and 14nm do eventually cross over the preceding curves, unlike the 40nm curve. And even putting the same transistor count on a smaller process node can result in lower power consumption once the leakage problems are mitigated, so the value is increased.

Edit: For historical background, here's a fascinating conversation from 5 years ago between Morris Chang (founder and chairman, TSMC) and Jen-Hsun Huang (CEO, Nvidia):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-x7PdnvCyI

it can't very well go to Intel given the amount of competition they are engaged in

That's not the reason. Intel's fabs are at capacity producing chips with much higher margins than GPUs. Check the price per die area on Geforce card vs. the CPU that goes on the same motherboard, and then remember that the video card is assembled and stuffed (with a ton of DRAM) and board tested where the CPU just has to be packaged and shipped. The economics simply wouldn't allow it even if Intel wanted to play.

> remember that the video card is assembled and stuffed (with a ton of DRAM) and board tested where the CPU just has to be packaged and shipped

I used to design CPU tests for a major x86 CPU manufacturer. 100% of manufactured chips are tested, sometimes at a length of many hours.

Maybe that was unclear. Obviously all ICs are tested. But the integrated board requires an extra step that the packaged CPU does not.

"Those really are pretty stunning words for a business relationship as big as this. "

Just another chapter like the breakup of wintel. The 500 pound gorilla in the room is that the PC business is no longer king. A company like TSMC has limited resources and as demand for them skyrockets from mobile companies the price goes up.

> (I'm not sure how independent GF really is - is it conceivable for Nvidia to work with GF?)

AMD just gave up their stake in GlobalFoundries, so I'm assuming so.

I would only add that they gave up their stake after issues with yield for Bulldozer and their Llano platform which is a generation behind at 32nm -- if NVIDIA wanted to play nice with GF at 22nm, I don't know how that would happen.

At the absolute cutting edge I think there are only 2 or 3 companies on the planet stamping hardware at that level; Intel being 1 of them, TSMC being another and I am sure IBM is in there somewhere (does IBM have its own foundries? Given their PowerPC history and then the Cell processor I assumed so, but maybe all that production was external?)

Yes, IBM has fabs that are similar to GF.

Samsung is the right choice given Sammys good track record of being a foundry to Apple and also for its own SoCs with high end GPUs and uses latest technologies like Low-Power High-K Metal etc.

GF is fully independent now:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401163,00.asp

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