NVIDIA bets on Samsung's 7nm lithography for upcoming Ampere graphics

Robert Sole 4 January 2019

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Information indicates that NVIDIA has signed an agreement with Samsung for its next generation of graphics cards for the gaming segment.

Turing graphics cards have just hit the market under the name NVIDIA GeForce RTX. These new graphics cards have been developed for RayTracing and DLSS, taking gaming to a new level of realism. These charts have a long life, as no new charts are expected to arrive this year. It has just been known that NVIDIA and Samsung have signed an agreement for the manufacture of future graphics. We could be talking about Ampere and as soon as 2020 for these next generation graphics.

NVIDIA to rely on Samsung's 7nm lithography for Ampere

We speak at this time of unconfirmed information, because Samsung and NVIDIA work under great secrecy. Turing has been a very secret architecture and at the moment we only know the supposed name of the next generation: Ampere. The strategy of allying with Samsung is due to the fact that the South Korean company has signed a 15-year agreement for R & D & i with IBM.

Jen-Hsun Huang is not at all comfortable with TSMC's stance of giving top priority to the production of AMD products. Lisa Su currently demands the Zen 2 (Ryzen 3000), Vega 2 and possibly Navi processors. In addition, TSMC has a still limited production capacity for large processors. These factors have led NVIDIA to leave the Taiwanese foundry.

Samsung bets strongly on 7nm EUV lithography

The South Korean company wants to make it clear that the EUV priority will bring a big jump in 7nm. 7nm lithography based on conventional ArFi technology is overlooked. The problem with this is that Samsung will not have it operational until the end of 2019 or early 2020, which is a delay compared to the Taiwanese foundry. Of course, the South Korean company's solution will offer better performance than TSMC's solution.

In addition to this, Samsung wafers will be offered to customers at a lower price. The EUV technology, among other things, allows the reduction of costs in the manufacturing process and the necessary matrices for the different layers.

It is not the first time that Samsung and NVIDIA have worked together. The Pascal GP107 GPU used for the GTX 1050 and GTX 1050 Ti are produced by the South Korean company in 14nm. TSMC is the one who manufactures the superior GPUs of the Pascal architecture in 16nm lithography.