To add to its recent troubles, NVIDIA has been swarmed by rumours that it had entered into a deal with GLOBALFOUNDRIES to produce its upcoming Tegra SoCs. This move would be a blow to long-time partner TSMC that would see the GeForce-maker working closely with the foundry formerly owned by competitor AMD.
However, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has specifically denied the rumour while talking at a press briefing in Taiwan.
Moving House
Digitimes reports that Huang emphasised his company's strong ongoing partnership with TSMC, flatly rebutting any suggestion that it may be planning to jump ship. He also took the opportunity to discuss the GPU-makers position in the market and how he saw it competing in the near future.
The CEO blamed the company's failure to launch an entire range of Fermi-based GPUs earlier this year for allowing AMD to gain significant market share with the Radeon HD 5000-series. However, he remained optimistic as to the company's fortunes in the fourth quarter of the year, pointing to growth in China and recovering markets in Europe and North America.
Greener pastures?
Lastly, Hunag denied the suggestion that NVIDIA will be under significant pressure as both Intel and AMD prepare to release increasingly powerful integrated GPUs. Citing the long delays associated with Fusion and Intel's history of weak graphics performance as indicators of the difficulty in combining CPUs and GPUs, he remained bullish on the company's position in the marketplace.
NVIDIA and TSMC have been bedfellows for some time, with Huang telling press that "our strategy is TSMC" only last year. However, poor yields of the early 40nm wafers and allocation issues resulted in limited availability of the original Fermi-based GPUs shortly after launch, possibly souring the relationship.
GloFo, on the other hand, has been aggressively competing with the Taiwanese foundry since it was spun-off from AMD in early 2009. It even announced a strategic partnership with ARM aimed at attracting companies like NVIDIA away from TSMC to manufacture Cortex A9-based SoCs.
