Nvidia’s backend service providers are reportedly not seeing the increased orders for testing and packaging of its latest GeForce RTX 40-series GPUs based on the Ada Lovelace architecture, says DigiTimes. They believe that the company is taking its time and letting its partners sell off any remaining GeForce RTX 30-series inventory before supplying them the latest generation graphics chips.
Nvidia’s OSAT providers, Siliconware Precision Industries (SPIL) and King Yuan Electronics (KYEC), have not received any indication from the company about scaling up production for the GeForce RTX 40-series despite the fact that Nvidia has introduced virtually all of its Ada Lovelace GPUs for client applications, including AD102, AD103, AD104, AD106, and AD107, the report says.
To aggressively ramp up output of new graphics processors, Nvidia has to produce them at TSMC and then test and assemble them at SPIL or KYEC. While the company pre-paid TSMC for its silicon manufacturing services in the 2021–2022 timeframe and probably has N4-based Ada Lovelace wafers in stock, it still needs to book OSAT capacity before ramping up orders to increase supply. However, it looks like Nvidia is satisfied with the current GeForce RTX 40-series output and has not shown any intention to increase it.
Normally, sales of GPUs from Nvidia to its partners trend up in the third quarter, so the company should be booking OSAT services now. If the report’s information is correct, it looks like Nvidia prefers to wait a bit before further ramping up testing and packaging of its Ada Lovelace silicon.
The company’s partners are already shipping GeForce RTX 4070, RTX 4070 Ti, RTX 4080, and RTX 4090 graphics cards for desktops. While these rank among the best graphics cards, demand apparently isn’t as high as Nvidia would like. There are also dozens of laptops employing GeForce RTX 4050, RTX 4060, RTX 4070, RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 Laptop GPUs. Nvidia’s Ada Lovelace graphics processors introduced so far cover virtually all market segments, and solutions like the recently launched GeForce RTX 4070 and the expected RTX 4060 should become rather popular. That means Nvidia will need more GPU volume and packaging services.
Perhaps Nvidia and its partners already have enough RTX 30- and 40-series GPUs to sell, so there’s no need to further ramp up testing and assembly even ahead of alleged GeForce RTX 4050 and RTX 4060 GPU launch in May–June. Certainly it hasn’t been trying to drop prices into the sub-$500 space yet. While testing and assembly procedures take time, they’re not as lengthy as the production of wafers, so even if Nvidia is behind its normal schedule by several weeks with ordering OSAT services, given the globally slow demand for new PCs, this is probably not going to create any tangible problems for the market.
We’ve seen plenty of reports of the severe downturn in PC and laptop sales, and after a couple of incredible years (in terms of demand and prices), it looks like many people and businesses are happy to stick with what they have for a while as we deal with economic uncertainties. Still, as this information comes from an unofficial source and lacks many details, take it is rumor rather than fact.
