HEXUS.sharewatch: NVIDIA falls on 28nm GPU delay reports

Speculation around the speed with which a new generation of graphics processing units (GPUs), based on the 28nm manufacturing process, will hit the market appears to be weighing on the shares of NVIDIA, and to a lesser extent graphics rival AMD.

The current rumours are summed up well by Slashgear, and concern the 28nm manufacturing process at giant semiconductor foundry TSMC. Chip-watchers Semi Accurate and Fudzilla have some healthy competition over who can offer the inside track on NVIDIA's Kepler GPU generation - the first to use the 28nm process.

NVIDIA's previously published GPU roadmap had Kepler launching sometime this year, but DigiTimes has joined the above publications in quoting anonymous sources as confirmation that it will now arrive in Q1 2012. Furthermore, it adds, Maxwell will arrive later than predicted too. This is blamed on problems with TSMC's 28nm process, and AMD's equivalent is predicted for the same timeframe.

It should be noted that Charlie and Fudo reckon AMD's 28nm GPU will arrive this year, and that a recent leak implied Qualcomm's 28nm SoCs may make an appearance this year, so the extent to which there are delays to TSMC's 28nm process on the whole is debatable.

Talking of Qualcomm, it has another little gain last week, but if you look at the past month you can see it has been on a good run. In fact, if Qualcomm's share price tops $60, that will be the first time it has done so since the height of the dotcom bubble 11 years ago.