Nvidia in talks with Global Foundries
NVIDIA CHIEF Jen-Hsun Huang has confirmed that his company is in talks with AMD spinoff fab company Global Foundries about making its GPU chips in the future.
Way back in March the INQ reported that Huang had met with GloFo's representatives. Now the Chinese site Expreview has an interview with Huang in which he's made his position clear.
"Global Foundries is a leading silicon foundry with advanced and outstanding processing technology," Huang said. "We're seriously evaluating and discussing about the possibilities of working with them."
If the deal goes through, it will mark a notable setback for Nvidia's current chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Nvidia has been upset with the chipmaker over the fab's poor yields of its GPU chips at the 40nm process node, a problem that TSMC now claims to have fixed.
Global Foundries, meanwhile, will be moving to 32nm, then to 28nm, bypassing 40nm altogether in favour of the smaller, more advanced process nodes. Huang is apparently increasingly worried that ATI could end up a generation ahead on process technology and could get better performance and economies of scale in production.
But Huang was not dismissive of TSMC, saying his firm still regards the Taiwanese fab as "a world-class silicon OEM with flexible strategies." Still, the green goblin may have considered that putting all its chips in one basket may not the best way to go.
Global Foundries' director of communications, Jon Carvill, told the INQ that his company sees "graphics as a key target market for high-volume manufacturing on advanced process nodes." He added, "Global Foundries has a proven track record of ramping complex, leading-edge processing products at mature yields."
As to Nvidia, Carvill told us his firm is looking forward "to compete for [both] AMD and NVIDIA graphics business in the future." µ
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Typically, you don't announce that you're in talks with supplier X unless you want to pressure supplier Y. While high level discussions are almost certainly going on, the key point of the announcement is to get TSMC to break a bit on pricing, so NV can keep those margins up. Timing wise, it doesn't make sense for NV to be hinting at this unless they're negotiating with TSMC for pricing right now (which means 40nm chips -- perhaps layout for GT300 didn't go so great, and they need a lower price-per-wafer to make a business case for it?)
All speculation and I'm sure that Gregg Bartlett, Jim Kupec and Doug Grouse have been talking with Huang, but this "revelation of talks" is just posturing. When GF announces that an agreement has been reached, or that NV has become a partner for 32nm or whatever THEN something will have happened.