TSMC reportedly receives large 7nm and 5nm orders from Nvidia

The second half of 2020 is set to transform the gaming market, both for console and PC gamers. Both Sony and Microsoft plan to unleash incredibly powerful consoles with their PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X console hardware; and in the PC space, both AMD and Nvidia are preparing to unleash next-generation graphics hardware.  

AMD’s RDNA 2 series of graphics cards will be a gamechanger for Radeon, offering gamers a 50% increase in performance-per-watt over the company’s existing RDNA graphics cards. This increase in efficiency comes thanks to architectural advancements, not a process shrink, signalling major changes within AMD hardware design. With such lofty performance claims, Nvidia needs to respond with a large generational leap of their own. 

DigiTimes has reported that Nvidia has made large 7nm and 5nm chip orders with TSMC, signalling the release of new graphics hardware from the company in the coming quarters. Right now, Nvidia manufactures no products using 7nm or 5nm lithography, which means that these chip orders must be related to future gaming or enterprise products. 

Today’s Turing series graphics cards from Nvidia currently use 12nm silicon from TSMC, which means that Nvidia’s next-generation hardware will benefit from a major node shift as well as any enhancements that the company has made to its latest graphics architectures. This node shift may give Nvidia the ability to deliver significant performance/watt advantages over today’s graphics hardware, potentially surpassing AMD’s gains with RDNA 2.