14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA and AMD went through a somewhat difficult period in 2009 and 2010, what with 40nm GPU yield issues, and it seems NVIDIA may be experiencing something similar with the Tegra 2.
Intel may have more or less locked NVIDIA out of the x86 chipset business, but the latter is in no way facing similar problems on the ARM front.
In fact, its newest Tegra SoC (system-on-chip) has proven quite formidable on the tablet market, as well as the segment of mobile phones.
The Tegra 2 is not only superior, performance-wise, to its predecessors, but is also supposedly less power hungry, among other things.
CES 2011 was the place where quite a few devices using the platform got showcased, Motorola, Toshiba and LG being just a few of the companies with such product plans in motion.
Unfortunately, said companies may be faced with a situation where they won't be able to ship as many phones or slates as they would like.
Granted, a recent report did not actually say supply was threatened overmuch, at least not yet.
Still, according to Fudzilla, NVIDIA might be having some yield issues with the SoC, although no other actual data is available at this time.
Since TSMC is the one making the chips on its 40nm manufacturing process, it will no doubt fall to it, not jsut NVIDIA itself, to remedy whatever situation has arisen.
So far, no companies made any sort of complaints, meaning that shipments are probably still going on as planned.
In fact, the likeliest problem is that NVIDIA would already want to have a bigger supply of chips but the wafers are probably ending up with more faulty chips than originally anticipated.
Depending on how soon the problem is alleviated, it is quite possible that Tegra 2 schedules and overall marketing success might escape unscathed.