Samsung won’t be manufacturing Nvidia’s Pascal GPU

Nvidia will launch the Pascal GPU next year as a successor of the Maxwell GPU with much better performance. Pascal features the latest HBM2 and 16-nm FinFET based designs so it’s really quite a piece of work, but unfortunately Samsung isn’t going to manufacture the Pascal GPU according to Business Korea. Instead, Nvidia has offered a contract to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which is an interesting choice since Samsung started producing 14-nm FETs before TSMC did. On the other hand TSMC has been a partner of Nvidia’s for 20 years and they have always had a consistent production process, something is very important to the GPU manufacturer.

This is a big loss for Samsung because the Pascal GPU is set to take next-generation even further. It’s a GPU that will feature an unparalleled 17 billion transistors, more VRAM and a far better memory capacity due to HBM2. It matters a lot because 4K and 8K displays are really making their way through the tech market and these sort of displays need a lot of power to deliver quality. Pascal also marks a milestone in next-generation gaming because it introduces NVLINK, which solves a lot of bandwidth issues that many powerful GPUs are currently facing. We’ll be getting a total of 1TB/s bandwidth, twice as much when compared to AMD’s Fiji cards (512 GB/s) and three times that of the GeForce 980 Ti (334 GB/s).

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