We covered TSMC's plans to produce the next generation of Nvidia's GPUs a while back and now an even more solid report has been released from DigiTimes. TSMC is getting ready to manufacture Nvidia's 16nm FinFET GPUs and there is a very high chance now that we see 20nm process skipped entirely. However, something that is very interesting is the fact that AMD's name is once again missing from the present partners list.

An image of cut dies in TSMC's fabrication. @unkown

AMD not listed in 16nm FinFET Partners List at TSMC - Nvidia 16nm FinFET GPUs Confirmed

However, there is just a sliver of uncertainty left as this is still a report from third party sources. TSMC will be holding its annual suppliers conference on Thursday and we will know for certain whether AMD's name was just further down the list or completely absent as we suspect. The details of 16nm and 10nm processes will be shared and all the major semiconductor partners will be there including Nvidia.

16nm FinFET tech is now ready for development since it has passed the required verification procedures and about 60 projects are already underway. Mass production is scheduled to start sometime in mid 2015. The known products in development on 16 nm are Avago, Freescale, LG, MediaTek, NVIDIA, Renesas and Xilinx. The list is obviously not exhaustive in nature but AMD should still have been included in this short list. There is the slight chance that the reporter did not consider AMD an important enough company to mention but the chance of that in my opinion is quite low unless the reporter had zero knowledge of the PC Hardware ecosystem.

TSMC is getting ready to buy fabrication equipment from ASML Holdings and the tech in question is the NuFlare lithography tech and will total to around $102 Million Dollar. Total expenditure of TSMC is expected to grow upto $9.6 to $10 Billion. This seems to one of the most positive reports I have heard about the semiconductor Industry in  a long time. Logically speaking, the only way they could recover and even surpass the lack of momentum (due to the 20nm delay) is by skipping the broken node entirely and moving to 16nm FinFET. Since mass production is scheduled for mid 2015, we should see 16nm FinFET GPUs by Q3 2015 at the earliest.