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Nvidia took the bold step of announcing its next-generation Blackwell architecture way back in March at its GTC conference, stating it’d be arriving later this year. Now that later this year has arrived, Nvidia has begun cranking up production via TSMC and is reportedly running into yield issues that could delay its full production just a tad.
This week the company announced its Q2 earnings for fiscal 2025, and as expected, it was another record quarter with revenue reaching a staggering $30 billion. Despite the company’s meteoric quarter, on the earnings call via The Fool, its CFO and EVP, Colette M. Kress, revealed it’s also had to address an issue with Blackwell in order to improve yields. She stated, “We executed a change to the Blackwell GPU mask to improve production yields.” CEO Jensen Huang was then asked about this change in the Q/A portion of the call, and he simply stated, “The change to the mask is complete. There were no functional changes necessary.”
The Blackwell chip features two dies fused together acting as a single chip with a 10TB/s interconnect.
Credit: Nvidia
This change to the mask used to make Blackwell GPUs was first hinted at in early August, when it was reported would be delayed by one quarter due to a design flaw. However, according to Tom’s Hardware the architecture required no changes, but rather a change in the mask was required to get all the intricate and complex components to line up properly; not an easy task given the complexity of the chip. Blackwell is the first products to use a new manufacturing process by TSMC that uses local silicon interconnect (LSI) bridges to connect the chiplets to an interposer, so it sounds like TSMC had to work out the kinks in this new process.
Despite the small setback, Nvidia says it will still ship billions of dollar’s worth of Blackwell GPUs in the fourth quarter, when production is set to begin in earnest. At the same time, the CFO also stated demand for Blackwell is already above supply, and it’s also improved the availability of its existing Hopper cards as well, which are known to have a very long waiting list. That list will surely get even longer when Blackwell debuts, as the AI boom continues full-throttle into 2025 and beyond.