| Tober said: Also the manufacturing of the hardware and it's sub components is outsourced. These contracts have a certain lifecycle that are not endless, because e.g. the maintenance needed on the machinery producing these components. How older the machinery the higher maintenance cost will become. Does Nvidea e.g. want to keep investing in the maintenance of the TegraX1 production? |
A little bit of knowledge is lacking on your behalf in regards to fabrication processes here.
The vast majority of chip manufacturing in the world is actually on older process nodes, there are fabs that are still producing 90nm chips for IC's and Industrial, Audio, Networking (Think Bluetooth and Wifi), Chipsets and more.
In 2022 for example, TSMC actually made 25% of it's profits from 40nm and older nodes.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17470/tsmc-to-customers-time-to-stop-using-older-nodes-move-to-28nm
Where other companies like UMC, SMIC get 80% or more of their revenue from older nodes.
Global Foundries actually stopped trying to build capacity on latest-generation nodes and has stuck with specialized 180nm/130nm/110nm/90nm/65nm/40nm/14nm etc', because the profit was greater.. And actually worked with Google to expand it's 180nm capacity.
The other misunderstood part of fabrication is that a plant can actually produce chips on different geometries.
For example Global Foundries Fab 7 produces chips at 130nm and 40nm on CMOS and SOI on 300mm wafers.
ON Semiconductor actually increased 65nm and 40nm capacities.
In 2023 India finished dumping 3.2~ Billion dollars on a new fab that produces 45nm and 65nm chips because it's actually a really good node with really good electrical characteristics for analog chips which is ideal for defense, space, industrial and automotive sectors.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/28/indias_first_chip_fab/
So just because it's an older lithography doesn't mean it's useless of wasting resources, older fabs don't disappear the chips they produce just changes or they get retooled to add more capacity/lithography/patterning etc'.
So the old fabs for the Tegra X1 are not going anywhere, once Tegra X1 is done and dusted in the Switch, nVidia will still be producing Tegra X1 for years to come for industrial/specialized purposes within the confines of current contracts who sometimes require support for decades.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
