NVIDIA says that Blackwell's design flaws are 100% on them, saying that TSMC had no part to play and that the Taiwan giant sorted the issue out.
NVIDIA Verifies That The Firm Indeed Witnessed Blackwell Design Flaws; However, The Issue Was Rectified At An "Incredible Pace"
Team Green's Blackwell AI portfolio is one of the most in-demand products in the industry, mainly due to the performance and capabilities it brings onboard. However, a few weeks prior to launch, it was rumored that the architecture had become a victim of design flaws, with the culprit being the packaging technology onboard, and the problem was associated with TSMC's CoWoS, creating the perception that the Taiwan giant was behind NVIDIA's Blackwell flaws.
However, in a report by Reuters, NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang has verified that Blackwell was indeed encountered with design flaws, but interestingly, TSMC had no part to play in it, and instead, it was "100% NVIDIA's fault". Here is what he had to say:
We had a design flaw in Blackwell. It was functional, but the design flaw caused the yield to be low. It was 100% Nvidia's fault. In order to make a Blackwell computer work, seven different types of chips were designed from scratch and had to be ramped into production simultaneously.
What TSMC did, was to help us recover from that yield difficulty and resume the manufacturing of Blackwell at an incredible pace.
- NVIDIA's CEO via Reuters
Well, it looks like NVIDIA has resorted to fixing Blackwell production, and interestingly, the blame is off TSMC's shoulders, given that Jensen himself has cleared the Taiwan giant off the list. The firm has sampled multiple chips to make a Blackwell product work out, which shows that the company was indeed faced with troubled yield rates, which would've been much more devastating for NVIDIA's business, but fortunate enough, Blackwell has been rescued.
Given that initial Blackwell products are now in the shipping phase, moving into Q4 2024, it will be interesting to see how the architecture turns out for the industry. NVIDIA has said that Blackwell is slated to be the most "successful" product in the company's history. The next phase of NVIDIA's AI hype will surely be interesting, potentially surpassing the hype created by the Hopper generation.
News Source: Reuters
About the author: Muhammad Zuhair is a hardware and technology reporter for Wccftech, specializing in the semiconductor industry and the complex interplay between technology, manufacturing, and geopolitics. His coverage focuses on the corporate strategies and technological roadmaps of industry giants like TSMC, NVIDIA, Samsung, and Intel. Zuhair's expertise lies in deconstructing complex topics such as fabrication nodes (e.g., 2nm process), the economic impact of policies like the CHIPS Act, and the strategic development of AI infrastructure from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel.
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