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nVidia Finally Goes 20nm
For much of the year we were under the impression that the second generation Maxwell will end up as a 20nm chip.
First-generation Maxwell ended up being branded as Geforce GTX 750 and GTX 750 TI and the second generation Maxwell launched a few days ago as the GTX 980 and Geforce GTX 970, with both cards based on the 28nm GM204 GPU.
This is actually quite good news as it turns out that Nvidia managed to optimize power and performance of the chip and make it one of the most efficient chips manufactured in 28nm.
Nvidia 20nm chips coming in 2015
Still, people keep asking about the transition to 20nm and it turns out that the first 20nm chip from Nvidia in 20nm will be a mobile SoC.
The first Nvidia 20nm chip will be a mobile part, most likely Erista a successor of Parker (Tegra K1).
Our sources didn’t mention the exact codename, but it turns out that Nvidia wants to launch a mobile chip first and then it plans to expand into 20nm with graphics.
Unfortunately we don’t have any specifics to report.
AMD 20nm SoC in 2015
AMD is doing the same thing as its first 20nm chip, codenamed Nolan, is an entry level APU targeting tablet and detachable markets.
There is a strong possibility that Apple and Qualcomm simply bought a lot of 20nm capacity for their mobile modem chips and what was left was simply too expensive to make economic sense for big GPUs.
20nm will drive the voltage down while it will allow higher clocks, more transistors per square millimeter and it will overall enable better chips.
Just remember Nvidia world’s first quad-core Tegra 3 in 40nm was rather hot and making a quad core in 28nm enabled higher performance and significantly better battery life. The same was true of other mobile chips of the era.
We expect similar leap from going down to 20nm in 2015 and Erista might be the first chip to make it to 20nm. A Maxwell derived architecture 20nm will deliver even more efficiency. Needless to say AMD plans to launch 20nm GPUs next year as well.
It looks like Nvidia’s 16nm FinFET Parker processor, based on the Denver CPU architecture and Maxwell graphics won’t appear before 2016.
ARM Seeing Growth
ARM and Vivante have achieved significant market share gains in the system-on-chip (SoC) GPU market while Imagination and Qualcomm have seen their market shares fall.
ARM has been aggressively pushing its Mali GPU design for the last two years, while Vivante has ridden the surge in Chinese tablet sales, and these factors have resulted in both firms increasing market shares. Analyst outfit Jon Peddie Research claimed that ARM and Vivante scored first half 2012 SoC GPU market shares of 12.9 percent and 9.8 percent, respectively, while the SoC GPU market share leaders Imagination and Qualcomm both suffered declines.
ARM more than doubled its market share from the same period a year ago while Vivante went even better by almost quadrupling its market share. Not only were both firms claiming large pieces of the pie, Jon Peddie Research claimed the SoC GPU market had increased by 91.3 percent, suggesting that Qualcomm and Imagination are having a harder time getting new business. Jon Peddie told The INQUIRER that new vendors are entering the market, typically with lower prices to earn customers.
Nvidia’s SoC GPU operations accounted for 2.5 percent of the total smartphone and tablet market, which given that the firm doesn’t license out its GPU designs is pretty impressive. Nvidia could see its market share increase if Microsoft’s Surface tablet sells well.