According to the latest report and rumors, Nvidia might have to delay its 16nm GPUs until 2016 due to issues with TSMC.


According to a report from Digitimes.com, picked up by Wccftech.com, TSMC has currently completed a US $47 million deal to purchase additional engineering equipment and machinery which should help it to bring new and upcoming 16nm FinFET manufacturing process technology to the market. According to the same report, TSMC is expecting to begin volume production of 16nm FinFET chips in late Q2 or early Q3 2015.

While it was originally scheduled for mass production in Q1 2015, TSMC had to delay the new 16nm FinFET production in order to satisfy Apple's A9 chip demands, which does not come as a surprise considering that it is the biggest customer for TSMC.

Unfortunately, this also means that Nvidia's next Maxwell GM200 GPU, which should be a key part of Nvidia's GTX 980 Ti or Titan II graphics cards, might be also hit by this delay, considering that it was scheduled to originally be based on that 16nm FinFET manufacturing process and depend on TSMC.

The "big daddy" GM200 GPU is not the only GPU that Nvidia plans to do on 16nm manufacturing process as it wants to do a second revision of the GM204, as well as a smaller GM206.

While Nvidia has decided to completely skip the 20nm manufacturing process and go from 28nm directly to 16nm, AMD does not have those problems as it will have 20nm products ready for 2015. In case everything goes well, or in case if the 16nm yields are not as good as expected, AMD might put a lot of pressure on the competition with 20nm chips.

In any case, we will probably hear a lot more as we draw closer to the end of the year.



Source: Wccftech.com.