NANJING, CHINA – JUNE 6, 2024 – Visitors visit the TSMC booth at the 2024 World Semiconductor Congress … [+]
Nvidia’s growing customer base has a big impact on the hardware industry.
News from the world of hardware manufacturing indicates that we are in for a different kind of market squeeze, similar in some ways to the broader chip shortages we faced a few years ago.
It’s also the same main player. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing is the leading supplier of high-precision technology that is in high demand right now.
To put that into context, as we reported last week, Nvidia just surpassed Apple and Microsoft in terms of market cap — which gives you an idea of the kind of demand the company will be making for the materials needed to make GPUs. – highly praised.
Now, those with a front-row seat are reporting that TSMC will double its production capacity next year, and Nvidia will take more than 50% of that supply. In fact, it appears that the drive for production is largely driven by orders from Nvidia.
CoWoS design
Nvidia’s Apple eye is TSMC’s CoWoS, or chip-on-wafer-on-substrate design that it’s trying to scale up to meet orders.
So what is this type of hardware engineering?
CoWoS allows for more input/output connections and three-dimensional assembly of components. It uses an interposer to facilitate shorter link lengths and reduce the need for power consumption. This makes it really useful for AI applications, because these sophisticated systems need all that power to run.
One way to describe it is that by placing different components close together at the edge, there is less latency and less latency. Another point would be that innovators are trying to match the need for robust data flow with the new routing and specific port types that CoWoS and related design provide.
Additional benefits of CoWoS
Simply put, TSMC’s configuration will allow companies to scale their GPU connections and hardware systems. They help with cooling and maintenance and provide better power integrity for continuous operations.
One way to describe the interposer design is that unlike stacking, it provides more of a bridge for the signal flow and shortens the distance between IP blocks.
MASHATU, BOTSWANA – JULY 24: A cheetah looks over the fields at Mashatu Game Reserve in July … [+]
This advanced packaging solution, combined with other innovations, is helpful in building those specialized hardware environments of the future.
Nvidia GPUs
Specifically, Nvidia is shipping tons of its GB200 and H100/H200 GPUs that are really effective for use in massive data centers like Elon Musk’s Colossus project which is by far the largest type of the project.
I was checking out the videos taking a tour of Colossus and when you see the massive cooling systems and infrastructure required, you realize how much demand there is on the hardware itself, which is kept at the scale of the AGI’s ability to generalize and generalize and switch to the next level.
Air cooler piping and shop HVAC system, air building superstructure … [+]
Of course, you’ll see the result of these hardware systems in the logic operations of our best and newest models, more detailed training and test data, and new things like inference. These types of activities allow machines to “sit and think” more like humans, and make more detailed decisions, while also providing transparent chains of thought and reasoning for their results.
Some of the key points would be that Nvidia is poised to dominate given its large share of TSMC production and that we will continue to see rapid transformation as companies like OpenAI and others are innovating AI agents . It seems like not only the models but also the hardware changes in the blink of an eye. It’s good to stay on top of these changes as they happen.