There have been plenty of rumors swirling around that Nvidia would be partnering up with Samsung to develop the next generation GPUs on a 7nm transistor process, and now that's confirmed.
Nvidia Korea has announced that it will manufacture new GPUs using Samsung's 7nm EUV (extreme ultra-violet) node, according to a report from PCGamesN.
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Nvidia just released its RTX Super graphics cards, the first batch of upgrades to its Turing architecture. However, these new GPUs simply boost clock speeds and add more CUDA cores to up performance – they're still Turing graphics cards. Nvidia's 7nm products will likely be an entirely new generation, likely Nvidia Ampere.
According to the report, Samsung will sample the new silicon to Nvidia and other partners by the end of the year. This could put Nvidia on track to launch GPUs built on the new node in 2020, as past rumors had suggested.
Not alone at 7nm
The move to 7nm will be a big step forward for Nvidia, as the current Turing processors are built on a 12nm node. But, it's worth noting that AMD is already at 7nm with its Ryzen and Navi products. Not only did AMD already release the 7nm Radeon VII, but it has the new Radeon RX 5700 and 5700XT coming July 7 alongside a whole slew of 7nm Ryzen 3000 CPUs.
By the time Nvidia releases a commercial GPU built on the 7nm process, AMD may end up releasing its next wave of 7nm products. Right now, its RDNA architecture already looks promising, and further refinement will likely make it even more so. Plus, AMD is also expected to shift to 7nm EUV in the future.
This all means the competition is likely to heat up between AMD and Nvidia. And, with Intel graphics cards expected as well, the big three could make 2020 incredibly interesting for PC builders.
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