Free Republic

Twelve years of cooperation Chipmaker for hire TSMC and Nvidia have announced the shipment of the one-billionth Geforce graphics core. In a collaboration spanning three decades, the two outfits have gone through several GPU generations and manufacturing nodes, starting with the ancient 250nm Riva cores. Currently TSMC produces 40nm parts designed by Nvidia and the 28nm node should come on line later this year. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang noted that the complexity of Nvidia’s GPUs has increased by more than one thousand times since the start of the partnership. TSMC CEO Morris Chang cited the success as a prime...

EDITORIAL Don't get too enamoured with your fancy, long term plans... Process technology is the best friend, and worst enemy of the graphics world.  Throughout the years we have seen improvements in process tech create new opportunities within the 3D graphics industry, and at the same time we have seen it be the downfall of certain products and cycles.  Today we see that in full effect, and for a variety of causes. Looking back through the years we have seen some great advances, and some huge stumbles.  Consider NVIDIA and their flawed GeForce FX design on a “not quite ready...