NVIDIA’s Kepler architecture, first introduced in 2012, has just about reached its retirement age. Out of NVIDIA the answer to that has come in two parts this year. How will AMD and NVIDIA solve the problem they face and bring newer, better products to the market? We don’t know, and not knowing the answer leaves us open to be surprised. This makes this a frustrating time – who doesn’t miss GPUs doubling in performance every 2 years – but also an interesting one. With no real precedent to draw from we can only guess what AMD and NVIDIA will do to maintain the pace of innovation in the face of manufacturing stagnation. What this means is that for consumers and technology enthusiasts alike we are venturing into something of an uncharted territory. They must iterate on their designs and technology so that now more than ever it’s their designs driving progress and not improvements in manufacturing technology. They can’t merely rest on their laurels for the 4 years between 28nm and the next node – their continuing existence means having new products every cycle – so they instead must find new ways to develop new products. With 28nm however that 2 year cadence has stalled, and this has driven GPU manufacturers into an interesting and really unprecedented corner. Given the embarrassingly parallel nature of graphics rendering, it’s this cadence in manufacturing improvements that has driven so much of the advancement of GPUs for so long. This meant that every 1-2 years GPU manufacturers could take advantage of Moore’s Law and pack in more hardware into a chip of the same size, rapidly increasing their performance. In years past TSMC would produce a new node every 2 years, and farther back yet there would even be half-nodes in between those 2 years. We start off with this tidbit because it’s important to understand the manufacturing situation in order to frame everything that follows. Consequently if you’re making something big and powerful like a GPU, all signs point to an unprecedented 4 th year of 28nm being the leading node.

As of this fall TSMC has 20nm up and running, but only for SoC-class devices such as Qualcomm Snapdragons and Apple’s A8. What isn’t happening is that after nearly 3 years of the leading edge manufacturing node for GPUs at TSMC being their 28nm process, it isn’t being replaced any time soon. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the biggest story in the GPU industry over the last year has been over what isn’t as opposed to what is.

Nvidia geforce gtx 980