NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang will be visiting Taiwan with hopes of securing future chip supply for its next-gen graphics cards. The GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs leverage TSMC’s N4 process, which is essentially a refined variant of the N5 node. Although this EUV lithography has a high enough yield, the wafers are still expensive. (Enlightenedwomen.org) A while back, we found out that the production of the RTX 4090 has been cut to make way for an additional H100 supply.
Jensen’s visit will have two more components to it. Firstly, Huang will be visiting TSMC bigwigs to talk about the wafer capacity allocation of the N4 process that powers the RTX 40 series GPUs. The RTX 4090 is already in short supply, and releasing additional Lovelace parts will put further strain on the supply chain. In addition, AMD just released the Ryzen 7000 CPUs leveraging the same with the Epyc Genoa and Radeon RX 7000 lineups on the horizon.
We can also expect the initial discussions regarding the allocation of the 3nm process (for the RTX 50 “Blackwell”) to begin. While it’s still far too early to discuss, unless Samsung spits a miracle out of its foundries, N3 is the logical next step. With that said, Apple will be TSMC’s only 3nm client next year, with AMD and NVIDIA getting a digs the year after.
The other important aspect of his visit will be concerning board partners. After EVGA pulled the plug on its GPU business and the “un-launching” of the RTX 4080 12GB, it’ll be crucial to assure AIBs about the present (RTX 30) and future (RTX 40) inventory of various SKUs.
Source: Mydrivers
