14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA is not going through the best of times, apparently being faced with the same chip supply problems as in 2009-2010, when TSMC's 40nm node turned out to be quite frustrating not just for it, but for AMD as well.
NVIDIA, and probably Advanced Micro Devices too, don't seem to be getting any sort of break as far as product supply goes.
The Santa Clara, California-based company would have amassed a sufficient supply of Kepler-based products by now if it were just up to it.
Unfortunately, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the foundry that makes the chips, is having yield problems with the 28nm process.
“Decline [of gross margin] in Q1 is expected to be due to the hard disk drive shortage continuing, as well as a shortage of 28nm wafers. We are ramping our Kepler generation very hard, and we could use more wafers,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia, during a conference call with financial analysts, according to X-bit Labs.
“The gross margin decline is contributed almost entirely to the yields of 28nm being lower than expected. That is, I guess, unsurprising at this point.”
NVIDIA is very enthusiastic about the upcoming GeForce 600 series, which is said to have already scored design wins at many PC OEMs.
We can only wonder how fast the desktop boards will sell out when the products finally go up for sale in April, 2012.
If they really are much stronger than AMD's Radeon 7000 line, they have a good chance of going out of stock even without low chip yields ensuing poor initial supply.
“[With Kepler, we] won design wins at virtually every single PC OEM in the world. So, this is probably the best GPU we have ever built and the performance and power efficiency is surely the best that we have ever created,” said Mr. Huang.