As reported by the Taipei Times, Yuanta Securities Investment Consulting Co has some very juicy details on Nvidia's next-generation GeForce (codenamed Ampere) graphics cards. According to the firm, Ampere will allegedly deliver up to 50% higher performance than current Turing at half the power consumption.
It's no secret that Ampere will come out of the 7nm furnace. Unlike AMD who remains faithful to TSMC, Nvidia will be hooking up with both TSMC and Samsung to produce the company's 7nm graphics cards. Therefore, stock shouldn't be a major concern for Nvidia.
Nvidia is currently a step behind AMD in terms of process nodes. Turing is built on TSMC's 12nm FinFET manufacturing process while rival Navi is already reaping the benefits of the 7nm node. However, Nvidia will achieve parity with AMD in the second half of this year as that's when Ampere is scheduled to arrive, according to Yuanta. AMD still has 'Big Navi' up its sleeves but if Ampere performs as Yuanta says it does, the Red Team is going to have a big problem on its hands.
| Microarchitecture | Foundry | Lithography | Launch Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ampere | TSMC & Samsung | 7nm | 2H 2020 |
| Turing | TSMC | 12nm | August 2018 |
| Pascal | TSMC & Samsung | 16nm & 14nm | April 2016 |
| Maxwell | TSMC | 28nm | February 2014 |
| Kepler | TSMC | 28nm | April 2012 |
| Fermi | TSMC | 40nm & 28nm | April 2010 |
Ampere fits in Nvidia's two-year span for launching a new GPU microarchitecture. If Yuanta's time frame is accurate, Nvidia will likely launch the Ampere at the annual SIGGRAPH conference, which is held in August. Nvidia previously announced Turing at SIGGRAPH so it makes sense to unveils its successor at the same venue.
Yuanta expects gaming graphics cards and notebooks sales to pick up when Ampere lands. Out of Nvidia's numerous partners, MSI should benefit the most since 60% of the company's sales originate from the gaming sector. As per the data compiled by Yuanta, MSI has the biggest piece of the gaming pie, ahead of other big-name manufacturers, such as Asus, Dell, Lenovo and Acer.
On a lesser scale, Asus and Gigabyte will probably profit from Nvidia's future Ampere offerings as well. Both brands harvest up to 30% of their revenues from gaming products.
