TSMC has announced that its exciting 7nm node production has entered production, with the company also announcing that it will be investing $25 billion into 5nm node technology.

The company has been talking and developing 5nm node technology since early 2016, with its eyes on a launch in 2020, and now it is putting its money where its mouth is. Reuters reports: "Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd, a supplier to Apple Inc, said on Thursday it expects to invest $25 billion in 5-nanometer node technology".

Apple should be interested in TSMC's focus on 5nm as they've been using TSMC for chip production for years now. TSMC is also forward-looking to 2022, when we should expect 3nm to pop its head out of the super-small chip production.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, otherwise known as TSMC, has announced that commercial production of 7nm chip has started. TSMC also teased that the newer 5nm node will enter mass production by the end of 2019, or early-2020.

The news comes directly from TSMC boss CC Wei, with DigiTimes reporting: "The ramp-up of 7nm chip output will boost TSMC's overall production capacity to 12 million 12-inch equivalent wafers in 2018, up 9% from 10.5 million units in 2017, Wei indicated, without elaborating on specific orders and customers".

DigiTimes continued: "TSMC will tape out more than 50 chip designs with its 7nm process technology by the end of 2018, Wei said. AI, GPU and cryptocurrency applications take up the majority of the tape-outs, followed by 5G and application processors. TSMC will also start taping out chips built using an enhanced 7nm node with EUV in the second half of 2018, Wei noted. The foundry expects to move the node to risk production in the third quarter".

NVIDIA CEO and all-round awesome guy Jensen Huang has given away 20 x TITAN V CEO Edition graphics cards, with each card powered by their Volta GPU and 32GB of HBM2.

Huang gave away 20 TITAN V graphics cards to AI researchers, after doing the same with the original TITAN V 12GB graphics cards when they were launched. The new TITAN V CEO Edition cards have a special signed package by Jensen himself, with a huge 32GB of super-fast HBM2 on-board.

NVIDIA chose 20 guests at random to join Huang in the hotel's center courtyard, where he presented them with a signed, limited edition TITAN V CEO Edition GPU.

It looks like NVIDIA might be delaying the launch of its next-gen GeForce GTX 1180, with sources saying a major Taiwanese OEM has returned 300,000 GPU units to NVIDIA... which could delay the new GTX 11 series cards.

SeekingAlpha is reporting that a major OEM that is considered in the "Taiwan Top 3" has returned 300,000 GPUs to NVIDIA. The site reports: "Reports out of Taiwan now suggest that NVIDIA has a gaming GPU inventory problem. 'Semiaccurate' reported on the issue yesterday, and cited excess inventory in the channel as the primary reason for new gaming GPU delay. The glut is so severe that one top Asian OEM partner reportedly returned 300k GPUs to NVIDIA".

Why would there be so many GPUs floating around and then returned? Well, the cryptocurrency mining epidemic would've caused this, and while it was good for a few months business-wise, now it could be biting NVIDIA in the (green) ass.

There was a shortage of GeForce GTX 10 series cards earlier this year, with the crypto mining boom seeing manufacturing being pushed into overdrive, and now there might be too many cards available. With all of the rumors of a GeForce GTX 1180 launch on July 30 and custom cards launching in August/September, gamers would be skipping GTX 10 series cards in favor of waiting for GTX 11 series cards.

Acer's new Predator Helios 500 gaming notebook has been somewhat of a mystery with its interesting choice of AMD's larger-than-life Radeon RX Vega 56... but now we have the skinny on what Acer will be doing with it.

We know the Acer Predator Helios 500 can be configured with up to the Intel Core i9-8950HK processor and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070, but it can also be configured with all-AMD components including the new Ryzen 7 2700 processor and Radeon RX Vega 56 graphics.

But we know that the Radeon RX Vega 56 has a 210W TDP in desktop form with a second "power save" BIOS that drops it to 135W, so what the hell (haha, it's HOT down there) will Acer do with the Predator Helios 500 to keep it cool? Well, it looks like the RX Vega 56 inside of the Helios 500 will have its TDP locked to 120W.

We told you the week before Computex 2018 that AMD would show off its next-gen 7nm GPU ready for the new wave of Radeon Instinct accelerators, and now Vega 20 has reportedly been through some benchmarks of Ashes of the Singularity.

The card has turned up with a device ID of "66A0:00", where it will be offering twice the density, twice the power e fficiency, and 35% improved performance over the Vega 10 on the 14nm FinFET node. The benefits of 7nm seem to be huge for Vega so far, but we'll need to see Vega 20 in Radeon RX Vega form before we can pass judgement.

Don't expect that until next year, before Navi arrives as a mid-range part with the purported Radeon RX 680. As for Vega 20, it rocks 32GB of HBM2 and 4096 stream processors into an area smaller than the current Vega 10 GPU. If that's not impressive, I don't know what is.

AMD's latest and greatest graphics card looks to be the new Radeon PRO V340, which is a multi-user computing solution for virtualized environments... you know, so not for gaming.

What makes AMD's new Radeon PRO V340 so special is that it features dual Vega 10 GPUs on 7nm, with a huge 32GB of HBM2 on-board. This seems to be the card that was teased at Computex 2018, and now it is becoming a reality.

The new Radeon PRO V340 features shared hardware encoding for H.265 and H.264 codecs, with something that AMD teases as a "built-in security processor" that we have no idea about just yet. This card is made for design and manufacturing, oil and gas research as well as the media and entertainment industry.

Just to be clear: this is not a gaming card, and nor will it be. I wish it was, as dual Vega 10s on 7nm with 32GB of HBM2 would be a monster.

The story of AMD collaborating with Sony on the Navi GPU architeceture for the next-gen PS5 console has really spread throughout the internet like wildfire, but one of the saving graces of AMD's future with Radeon against GeForce was MCM, or multi-chip modules.

But according to a new interview between PCGamesN and RTG's new SVP of Engineering, David Wang, we could be waiting a while. Wang said AMD is "looking at the MCM type of approach, but we've yet to conclude that this is something that can be used for traditional gaming graphics type of application". So no MCM for Navi, makes sense.

This is not surprising at all, as Navi has seen two-thirds of RTG engineers working with Sony, while AMD plans its next-gen GCN architecture for post-Navi. No MCM for Navi, at least in its first-gen iteration, makes total sense. It's a departure to ex-RTG boss Raja Koduri, who wanted to take full advantage of the Infinity Fabric interconnect to throw copious amounts of GPUs onto a single ASIC design.

We are so close to the launch of NVIDIA's next-gen GeForce GTX 11 series graphics cards I can almost smell the PCB, especially with the fresh rumors popping up today about a "new video output" on the new cards.

The new rumors come from Igor Wallosek who has talked with NVIDIA's AIB partners R&D teams, who said: "You can already look forward to a new way of a very specific video output and NV has also fundamentally changed the tact and its handling". This is an interesting rumor, and something that has weight to it.

NVIDIA's update to the video output makes sense if they are going to offer HDMI 2.1 that will usher in 4K 120Hz HDR support... perfect for those Big Format Gaming Displays (BFGDs) that NVIDIA has coming out in the coming months.

The price of the new flagship GeForce GTX 1180? We're being told to expect somewhere between $999 and $1499.

It was only yesterday that I wrote about Sony co-developing the Navi GPU architecture with AMD for its upcoming next-gen PS5 console, but what about the Navi GPU itself for the Radeon graphics market?

Well, the Radeon RX 680 according to my sources will be powered by the Navi GPU architecture and feature 8GB of GDDR6 memory, with the performance of the GTX 1080 to GTX 1080 Ti or so. We should expect a price of somewhere in the $299-$399 range, and will battle the GTX 1080 Ti at higher resolution games because of its faster GDDR6 RAM.

I talked to some industry sources over the last few months, and then some new ones at Computex 2018 that told me Navi wouldn't be here until at least half way through 2018. Another source said that it would not be that great, in the way that it will not be a successor to Radeon RX Vega at first, but rather the Radeon RX 680 powered by Navi 10.

AMD will strike back with Navi 20 on 7nm as a high-end GPU in the 2020-2021 timeframe, but in the meantime will have to hobble to market with a really good mid-range graphics card. The thing is, to AMD it won't be a mid-range graphics card based on Navi 10 will allow AMD to have a cheaper GDDR6-based graphics card that hits GTX 1080-1080 Ti levels at under $400.