StrangerGuy
Diamond Member
- May 9, 2004
- 8,443
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Well, its not like games which are worth playing AND needs more than a 5850 justifies an upgrade over that card of mine.
Can't Samsung, Globalfoundries, or IBM do it?
Can't Samsung, Globalfoundries, or IBM do it?
Do any of them make anything 500mm^2 (or 300mm^2) on 28nm? Something that large is a lot of the problem.
Unless they have the world's tiniest wafers, I don't see why GPUs would be a problem. IBM makes their POWER CPUs, which probably get quite large for some models.
Larger chips are harder to produce. Look at the issues nVidia has been having with their big chips. Wafer size isn't the issue.
All else equal (including holding the chip design constant), larger wafers reduce wasted silicon (around the perimeter of the wafer) and improve the per-chip economics (since cost doesn't scale linearly with wafer size). This is why NV mentioned working with TSMC to encourage them to use larger wafers in the future:
http://www.extremetech.com/computin...y-with-tsmc-claims-22nm-essentially-worthless (Scroll down to their "Wafer price is hiking up" slide and read the last line: "collaborate to move to bigger (450mm) wafers."
More:
http://www.sumcosi.com/english/products/next_generation/large_diameter.html
That said, it is unclear to anyone without insider information if there are massive increases in yield waiting to be had, if only NV would engineer their designs "better." Charlie at SA has been incessantly beating that drum, and there is some truth to that (see, e.g., how AMD used double vias to deal with TMSC's poor 40nm yields), but I haven't ever seen any hard evidence that NV is incompetent at designing chips.
I wasn't talking about costs. I wasn't talking about wafer size, either. I was just talking about the apparent difficulties with making these big monolithic chips. I'm not blaming nVidia. I'm not blaming anyone. AMD has avoided the issues, but they don't design big chips.
I wasn't talking about costs. I wasn't talking about wafer size, either. I was just talking about the apparent difficulties with making these big monolithic chips. I'm not blaming nVidia. I'm not blaming anyone. AMD has avoided the issues, but they don't design big chips.
The 7970 is actually bigger than the GTX680 Kepler. As the poster above me noted, this is less likely to do with the size but rather the architecture/complexity of the design itself that's causing more issues with nVidia's Kepler than AMD's GCN (could be the clock speed-to-TDP as well. We've seen how conservatively AMD has clocked its 7970 by how much headroom the cards have even in reference designs as opposed to the GTX680 which has only a marginal OC with the turbo factored in). I think the GTX680/GK104 > GTX670Ti rebranding is indicative of that being the case. nVidia has different models but currently they all seem to be focused on the mobile platforms rather than the desktop. At the moment and for the near future the only desktop chip is the GTX680 and who knows when or even if we'll see any others.
Thanks for the news. I am now expecting:
7970 3GB - $490
7950 3GB - $390
7950 1.5GB - $370
7870 2GB - $300
7850 2GB - $230
It looks like AMDs bean counters may know something we dont.
At the moment and for the near future the only desktop chip is the GTX680 and who knows when or even if we'll see any others.
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/news/video/breaking-news-amd-hd-7970-price-drop-incoming/
I imagine that Nvidia will soon have enough die harvested GK104s to release a GTX670 of some sort. NV seem to be experts at die harvests.