NVIDIA Now Using Chartered Semiconductor
In addition to TSMC, UMC, and IBM, NVIDIA will now be adding Chartered Semiconductor to their list of current foundry partners. The driving factor behind this new business relationship is to provide NVIDIA with more leverage in terms of pricing with key foundry partner TSMC. This will be accomplished by having NVIDIA allocate a certain percentage of GPU production away from TSMC and towards UMC and Chartered. The first NVIDIA product manufactured at Chartered will be a GeForce 7100 GS with no other products currently slated for production at this time. With Chartered also manufacturing AMD processors and likely ATI GPU's, it will be interesting to see how NVIDIA manages this new business relationship in the future.
GeForce 7100GS, which launched on 31st August 2006 has two versions A2 and B2. The A2 version, model name GF-7100GS-N-A2 is manufactured by TSMC in Fab12 and Fab14 with 110nm process. While the B2 version, model name GF 7100GS-N-B2 is manufactured by Chartered Semiconductor in Fab6 and Fab7 also with 110nm process.
