TSMC’s 7nm production line is saturated by high demand for processors from AMD. This forced NVIDIA to abandon the Taiwanese foundry and seek a new partner, with Samsung being the only viable option. Despite everything, Samsung’s problems with its 8nm lithography have ended up causing problems and that is why NVIDIA will return to TSMC for the Hopper architecture.
The anger at NVIDIA would be significant, as Samsung is failing to keep up with demand. TSMC’s situation would not be better, since according to the data the stock of AMD RX 6800 XT graphics will be limited. And it is that TSMC is unable to meet the gigantic demand, especially for Ryzen processors.
NVIDIA will return to TSMC with the Hopper architecture
As it has been leaked, NVIDIA wants the Hopper architecture to be manufactured in TSMC’s 5nm lithography. This is something quite logical, since the Taiwanese function is quite ahead of Samsung. Note that the NVIDIA A100 for Data Centers and AI of Ampere architecture are manufactured in 7nm by TSMC. But the Taiwanese foundry already told NVIDIA that they could not meet the demand for Ampere-based gaming graphics.
And the problem is in the error rate per wafer of Samsung. Initially the error rate was quite acceptable, but something would have made it noticeably worse. This would be generating a notable lack of graphics card stock that we do not know when it will improve.
Yesterday a representative of ASUS indicated that the stock of RX 6800 XT would fly in minutes due to lack of stock. The stock improvement would not arrive until December, being optimistic. One of the reasons would be the mass production of the semi-custom SoCs for Sony and Microsoft. Between the Ryzen 3000, the Ryzen 400 APUs, the Ryzen 5000, the console SoCs and now the RX 6000, the 7nm machines from TSMC go all out.
We don’t know much about NVIDIA Hopper, except that they would be manufactured by TSMC under 5nm, according to the rumor. Indicate that the name of this architecture is due to Grace Hopper, a military woman who was a pioneer in software engineering and developer of the Cobol language.
