NVIDIA will show us the new GTX1060, equipped with the GP106 GPU, next 7 July. This release is almost 3 months ahead our leaked/rumored Pascal roadmap. Is it a surprise move?
This move should not surprise us, because NVIDIA has to counter attack - as soon as possible - AMD Polaris 10 cards in order to maintain the market share leadership. Actually AMD cards are selling very well and, as we said some weeks ago, NVIDIA has to keep as low as possible AMD market share. How to achieve this goal?
It’s simple. You have to start spreading doubts (NVIDIA has the best marketing department!): how much fast is the GTX1060? Will it be better than RX480? Will it be cheaper than RX480? Etc. Thanks to this strategy, a lot of users will not buy the AMD cards.
According to our sources, NVIDIA has limited 16nm productive slots at TSMC, so it has to choose the GPU to produce carefully. Intel is attacking HPC market thanks to Xeons Phi, AMD is attacking consumer market thanks to Polaris 10.
Here there are some numbers (NOT official):
- At the present moment TSMC's output is about 60k wafers/month @16nm (80k during 4Q16). The main customers are: Apple, NVIDIA, Huawei/HiSilicon, Qualcomm, LG, MediaTek and Xilinx (and others). 60/7 = about 9k wafers/month each company
- GloFo's output (14nm) is about 40k wafers/month (60k during 4Q16). Main customers are: AMD and Qualcomm = 20k wafers/month each company
Also, TSMC during 2H16 will have zero new slots available, according to CTIMES: “TSMC’s Production Capacity to Be Fully Loaded in the H2”. At the present moment, it’s hard to find custom GTX1070 cards, so probably will be hard to find custom GTX1060 cards until the end of the year, too.