[kurthr]

I agree... there's not much more they can do to scale since off die is still slow. Unless they stitch across the exposure boundary!

However, they have been at the reticle limit since they were in 28nm. GM200 (980 Ti and Titan X) was 601 mm^2 at TSMC... the maximum possible at the time.

[tostitos1979]

I've seen some huge mainframe die back in the day. What is reticle limit exactly? Thanks for educating a SW guy :)

[Terribledactyl]

Part of the chipmaking process is burning layers into wafers covered in photoreceptive material. Photomasks/reticles used to cover entire wafers making many units at once, but now the processes are so small they have to compress the image (4-10 times is typical), burn a couple units, step over repeat on the same wafer. This GPU is so large, they can only fit 1 of them in a single burn step.

[tbrownaw]

It's something along the lines of the film size for the super fancy camera they use in one of the steps. (The silicon wafer would be the equivalent of the entire roll of film.)

[deepnotderp]

193i immersion steppers,a la ASML have 32x26 as the reticle limit