NVIDIA Won't Have Globalfoundries Make Tegra, Sticks to TSMC

Since the rumor mill decided at one point or another to spawn reports that NVIDIA would be contracting Globalfoundries to manufacture its Tegra products, the GPU maker's CEO saw fit to dismiss those claims by saying that NVIDIA plans to maintain its strong partnership with TSMC.

As consumers know, the Tegra SoC (system-on-chip) is NVIDIA's ARM-based solution for the mobile market.

The Tegra 2 has, in fact, been adopted by a fair number of tablets, though most, if not all, of them have yet to come to market.

Some time ago, it was implied that NVIDIA would begin to shift orders away from its current foundry partner, TSMC, and have Globalfoundries make the products.

According to the most recent report made by Digitimes, NVIDIA's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang issues what it calls an exclusive press conference for the Taiwan media.

In it, the CEO clearly states that NVIDIA has no such designs, intending to, instead, emphasize the collaboration with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

The report also states that Huang made a point of again stating that AMD's advantage in the graphics market is only temporary.

NVIDIA's rival managed to gain the upper hand because NVIDIA only got around to unleashing two high-end Fermi cards in the second quarter.

This left AMD as the sole supplier of DirectX 11 mainstream and entry-level cards, a situation that has been gradually 'remedied' since.

NVIDIA now has the GeForce GTX 360 and the GTS 450 and will soon bring out the GT 430, for the entry-level segment.

As for the CPUs with on-die graphics that AMD and Intel will soon launch, Huang said that they are not a very big threat because combining CPU and GPU together is a difficult task in itself even without trying to match standalone grpahics solutions.

To enforce this view, the CEO mentioned that AMD already delayed the Fusion for two years and Intel's Sandy bridge don't support DirectX 11.