A report at Digitimes states that TSMC have already taped out around 80
products for their 90nm process and they state that around 40 more will be
taped out by the end of the year, with mass production slated for next year.
With the main graphics vendors being fabless they will be looking to the
likes of TSMC, and others, in order to utilise their latest processes for
ever more complicated chips - while 80 products may have already gone
through TSMC's 90nm tape-out its unlikely that they are likely to be
anything near as complex logic ASIC's as required for modern high end
desktop graphics.
It is, however, expected that ATI will have based the R500 "Xenon" (XBox 2)
graphics part on TSMC's 90nm process, leaving Microsoft in charge of placing
orders on the final chips. If Microsoft wants to ship Xenon in 2005 then the
final chip will need to have been developed to leave enough time to begin
ramping in order to build inventories for the launch - given that ATI have
already stated that some engineers from the Xenon project have been deployed
to other projects this suggests that tape-out has already occurred, or is at
least imminent. It's also expected that ATI's next generation high end
desktop graphics chip, R520, will appear in the first half of 2005 and given
ATI's CEO's comments on the silicon requirements of a Shader Model 3.0,
which it is assumed R520 will support, its likely this will also be 90nm
based and tape-out should be around this timeframe in order to bring it to
market within the first half Q2 '05.
A couple of conflicting reports for NVIDIA have suggested that they may
still be shopping around for their next process beyond 110nm. While IBM or
TSMC may normally have been NVIDIA's first port of call for next generation
processes, NVIDIA's reluctance to use TSMC's 130nm low-k may be causing them
to be a little leery of TSMC's 90nm node as it is currently only offered
with low-k dielectric materials. There have also been persistent reports
over capacity and yield issues on IBM's customer lines which, whilst
improving, may well carry over to finer processes which could be another
cause for concern. Rumours have suggested that NVIDIA's next high end chip
refresh to "NV47" may boost performance by increasing the number of internal
pipelines whilst moving to 110nm, with a larger shift to 90nm later with the
NV5x platform - ATI's continued use of 150nm for R300, R350 and R360 was
proof that continuing longer on a tried and tested process can still yield a
performance advantage as whilst top end clock-speed may be limited in
relation to the newer processes, a greater understanding can allow for
larger die sizes with greater parallelism affording more performance per
cycle.
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