A public pat on the back for TSMC from NVIDIA, after rumors they are looking for 28nm capacity at other foundries and publicly stated 28nm yields were to blame for Kepler's late appearance and slow ramp up.
Read the full blog at NVIDIA.com
Kepler is manufactured using TSMC’s 28nm high performance (HP) process, the foundry’s most advanced 28nm process which uses their first-generation high-K metal gate (HKMG) technology and second generation SiGe (Silicon Germanium) straining. Both technical advances improve the performance per watt of the transistor translating to a more power efficient system.
Using TSMC’s 28nm HP process enabled us to reduce active power by about 15 percent and leakage by about 50 percent compared to 40nm, resulting in an overall improvement in power efficiency of about 35 percent.
Today, the primary constraint on processor performance is the power consumption budget. So our goal is always to develop solutions that deliver the highest performance within a fixed power budget. Having a more efficient process enabled us to add more processing cores, thus increasing performance. Put simply, greater efficiency equals greater performance and optimal performance per watt.
Read the full blog at NVIDIA.com