Nvidia: “No rush to 7 nanometers”

It was in the autumn of 2018 that Nvidia launched the Geforce RTX series, with the new architecture Turing. Prior to launch, it was unclear whether Nvidia would use TSMC’s 7-nanometer technology or stay at well-proven 16 nanometers. The choice fell on a refined variant of the latter, called 12 nanometers.

Despite the fact that Turing only has six months on its neck, there is speculation about the next step, where it is said in advance that the name of the next architecture will be Ampere and that manufacturing will take place at 7 nanometers. However, there is much to suggest that Nvidia is in no hurry to get there, which is now also confirmed by Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang.

What makes us special is we can create the most energy-efficient GPU in the world at anytime, and we should use the most affordable technology. Look at Turing. The energy-efficiency is so good even compared to somebody else’s 7nm.

In an interview with Synced, Huang explains that Nvidia’s graphics architecture Turing and associated circuits are already the most energy efficient, enabling them to use the most affordable manufacturing techniques. In other words, the company is in no hurry to go down to a higher-performing and more energy-efficient technology that is more expensive to manufacture with.

In the same breath, he adds that Nvidia’s energy efficiency is already good compared to “someone else’s 7 nanometers”. This can be seen as a clear slip against AMD, whose graphics card Radeon VII, despite manufacturing at 7 nanometers, lags behind Turing in terms of energy efficiency.

When we first came to the market and announced the product I had so much inventory for crypto. I cannot bring the whole family [of RTX chips]!

Huang also confirms that the launch of the Geforce RTX family took a long time, as the company sat on large stocks of Geforce GTX 1000 models after miningthe hysteria subsided. Now, however, that problem should be almost out of the world, which is why the company has started releasing new graphics cards in lower price ranges.

For Bloomberg, Nvidia’s CFO Colette Kress says that the company is optimistic about the financial year 2020, this after a disastrous first quarter which was partly due to large stocks of older graphics cards and declining sales of new models.

SweClocker’s graphics card tests: