An NVIDIA engineer is pushing for the industry to move toward 450mm wafers as soon as possible, as GPUs are getting more and more complex to make, it's just going to become a requirement soon enough.

By the end of this decade, we're going to require many more technologies to keep the industry headed toward a trillion transistor device, according to Sameer Halepete, vice president of VLSI engineering at NVIDIA. He said this in a keynote at a Mentor Graphics user conference. He added:

The challenges are similar to what they were before, and though their nature has changed, I'm very confident we will overcome them.

Halepete also mentions that the industry needs to move toward 450mm wafers in order to deal with the number of masks and process steps required to make chips. The larger 450mm wafers would spread the costs out among more chips and reduce the processing time per chip.