TSMC: delay with 40nm & consequences

According to information gathered by the The Inquirer, TSMC has had to delay the introduction of 40nm. In March, the company indicated that it hoped to produce the first wafers before the end of June. It is now a question of February/March 2009 if everything goes well, which represents an non-negligible delay.

Thus, Altera, which is generally one of the first to benefit from the Taiwanese manufacturer’s production lines, will not offer 40nm chips this year. According to our colleagues, other large companies are concerned including Nvidia. However, given the fact that they are only starting to use 55nm with the G92b (the GTX 200 is still produced in 65nm), this actually shouldn’t be too detrimental. Unsurprisingly, ATI will also be affected and consequently we shouldn’t expect to see any 40nm GPUs from them before the first quarter of next year. This is nothing too dramatic in the long run because 55nm will still enable offering interesting GPUs for some time and the Intel Larrabee will only arrive much later.