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It seems that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is not only having problems with its manufacturing node at 7 nm, since now the problems seem to have also extended to the manufacturing node at 16 nm, a node still very much alive but not producing enough chips to satisfy the demand. What is happening with TSMC? The problems that TSMC is having to meet the demand for 7 nm chips is well known, and although the company has multiplied the production of these chips by three, they still do not cover all the orders they receive. And, while the company is still working on solving these supply problems that, among others, are affecting AMD, things get even more complicated because they are also beginning to suffer delays in the deliveries of the 16 nm node chips. There are also problems with the 16 nm, what happens to TSMC? It seems that at this point the manufacturing node at 16 nm would be a thing of the past, but nothing is further from the truth: it is a very live node, and many customers continue to design and manufacture products based on this lithography, given that the manufacturing process It is very mature, it works very well and they are much cheaper chips than smaller nodes, and therefore they are much more profitable. TSMC logo with background chips The fact is that, according to the source, TSMC is delaying the deliveries of these 16 nm chips to its customers because they are not manufacturing enough, so from where there is not can not be taken and are delaying many shipments. The causes of all these problems are uncertain, since TSMC has not issued any statement in this regard, at least for now. It is speculated with many different reasons, but the ones that have more weight and that make the most sense are that the company's factories have work saturation and do not give enough, or that they are still suffering the consequences of that cut of the electricity supply that They had a while ago. Another reason with which it is speculated is that they may have had contamination problems in the "clean rooms" (rooms in which not a single dust mite can enter to avoid contaminating production), because although it is difficult because they are taken Many security measures, is something that can happen. In any case, as we said the company has not issued any statement yet to explain what is happening to them, but that TSMC does not stop having problems is already a fact at this point, and this in the end is harming large-scale manufacturers such as AMD .
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For some generations now, NVIDIA uses the same desktop GPUs on laptops, although with some differences to reduce its consumption. In essence they are the same GPU, but NVIDIA drivers continue to differentiate those dedicated to dedicated graphics on PCs and laptops. Why do they do it and what are the differences? In this article we explain everything. What is the difference between a laptop and desktop GPU? First of all, it should be clarified that, some time ago, the GPUs of the laptop and those of the dedicated graphics of NVIDIA were completely different, and in fact those of the laptops had the distinctive "M" at the end of their name for better differentiation. However, for a long time the GPU is essentially the same, but with some reduced attributes in order to reduce its consumption. Thus, for example, an RTX 2080 in its reference model for desktop, has 2,944 shader units, with 8 GB of GDDR6 memory and a 256-bit interface that makes it work at 14 GHz effective, delivering a bandwidth of 448 GB / s. The RTX 2080 notebook is exactly the same, with the same parameters, but nevertheless its speed is slightly lower, around 9% slower in its base speed and 7% in its Boost speed. The performance is also slightly lower on the notebook model, but instead of consuming 215 watts, it consumes only 150W. We do not speak, however, of the Max-Q variants, which are graphics with a much lower consumption (90 watts in this case) and with much lower operating speeds, so the performance also plummets. If the GPU is the same, why are the NVIDIA drivers different? When we go to the NVIDIA driver download website, when choosing the graphics model for which we want to download the drivers, the normal models are clearly different from those of the notebook (Notebooks). But there is a difference that we can clearly see: size. The desktop drivers, to the right of the image, occupy 570.94 MB compared to 523.27 MB of the desktop graphics version. This difference in size is because the laptop drivers have a lower level of customization, although the firmware and the driver itself is exactly the same, as well as the same technologies because, remember, the GPU is the same. Why if the driver is the same occupy different size? If you have read this far, surely you are asking yourself precisely this question: why do they have a different level of personalization? This is because, with the "NVIDIA Notebook Driver" program, the company ensures the correct functioning of the reference model - we speak in this case only of laptops. However, most laptop manufacturers modify these GPUs to offer higher performance, lower consumption or lower temperature, and therefore the operation may be different and not work perfectly with the NVIDIA driver.