News Nvidia in Talks With Intel Foundry, 'Intel and AMD Know All Our Secrets'

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I remember long ago when I was a new engineer. Nvidia was looking for someone to make their new Geforce GPU for them. They were practically begging Intel to fab their chips for them. Intel told them to go pound sand, we're not anyone's foundry.
 
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thisisaname said:
Is this due to them annoying both TSMC and now Samsung?
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I feel it is all cost driven. Nvidia said that they moved to Samsung because they wanted to diversify the production of their GPUs. But if you look at the choice of node selected, Nvidia went for Samsung’s 8nm (which is a 10nm) instead of the superior 7nm. So in my opinion, the action is more to reduce cost, and diversification is just an after thought or secondary reason. In other words, Nvidia not sticking with TSMC and exploring other foundries is also going to be largely cost driven. Having said that, they will need to diversify because with what we see with Ukraine, there is always a risk of Taiwan getting invaded. So if that is to happen, then they will lose all chip making capability. I am sure the other big chip makers will also have this in mind, thus, we see them using Samsung, and for some, hear rumours of them checking out Samsung foundry, i.e. AMD.
 
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digitalgriffin said:
NVIDIA see's the coming crisis in Taiwan. They are hedging bets with Samsun and Intel
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maybe that is one of the reason but nvidia has been looking for alternative other than TSMC for a very long time now. the talk to use samsung starts in 2012 when in the same time nvidia also openly talk about their dissatisfaction on the situation with TSMC 28nm. i think it is also around the same time when nvidia publically said that intel should open their fab for others to use.
 
thisisaname said:
Is this due to them annoying both TSMC and now Samsung?
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nvidia might annoy TSMC but ultimately TSMC have said that they want nvidia to fab with them more. this is after nvidia end up choosing samsung as their main partner to produce their 30 series. plus for 2021 7nm wafer allocation nvidia actually got a lot of space from TSMC. AMD being the biggest TSMC 7nm customer end up getting 27% of TSMC 7nm capacity and they make CPU, GPU and console on that node. Nvidia is TSMC second largest 7nm customer with 21% of 7nm allocation. and nvidia mostly only make A100 on TSMC 7nm. TSMC giving nvidia quite a lot of capacity just for that compared to AMD that pretty much make everything on than node.

Samsung? they still need a lot of proving to be done before they can get annoyed with nvidia. nvidia is very well known to have crazy demand. TSMC has been dealing with that side of nvidia since the 90s. right now Qualcomm are quite dissatisfied with the yield on Samsung 5nm process. Qualcomm take both samsung and TSMC 5nm and the yield on samsung 5nm is 35% while on TSMC the yield are over 70%. there are talks about how samsung are lying on yield to convince some chip maker to use their process. i heard samsung intend someone inside the company to take responsibility on this issue. if anything samsung will want nvidia to stay on their foundry and help them invest on the fab advancement the same way nvidia did with TSMC years ago.
 
If Intel itself outsource their GPU fab to TSMC, why would NVidia would use Intel Fab to produce their GPU ? I suspect that money the most likely answer ... 😏
 
samopa said:
If Intel itself outsource their GPU fab to TSMC, why would NVidia would use Intel Fab to produce their GPU ? I suspect that money the most likely answer ... 😏
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intel is increasing their fab capacity going forward. they scoff at nvidia idea about opening their fab to others before forever thinking that no other fab can ever surpass them but 14nm happen and TSMC finally showed them that working with hundreds of different client with different needs will give you an experience that you will never had if you only make your own product.
 
samopa said:
If Intel itself outsource their GPU fab to TSMC, why would NVidia would use Intel Fab to produce their GPU ? I suspect that money the most likely answer ... 😏
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Money is part of I'm sure, but another part is likely capacity, and the last part may well be access to the most advanced nodes.

I mean, we keep talking about TSMC 3nm and 5nm, but pray tell - what GPUs and x86 CPUs that you can buy are currently made on the 2 year old TSMC 5nm node? Correct answer : None. We'll see them in the 2nd half of this year, maybe. Meanwhile Apple will likely use N4, and updated version of N5, for the iPhone 14 - since TSMCs N3 is late.

Which basically means, the real-world delivered product node advantage for x86 on TSMC vs x86 on an Intel node just shrunk to 6 months for anyone other than Apple, since Intel 7 (aka '10nm') is equivalent to TSMC 7nm.

Since Intel 4 is supposed to come online late this year for products hitting in 2023 (Meteor Lake), and is slightly better than TSMC N5 (more like TSMCs N4, an enhanced N5 node) this could leave a lot of Intel 7 node capacity for a client like Nvidia.

Since Intel 7 is roughly 80% more dense than Samsung's '8nm' node, and roughly equal to TSMC 7nm, Nvidia could probably put a lot of their more mainstream 40 series parts on these nodes along with any holdovers \ rebadges from the 30 series
 
I'd love to see a side by side comparison between fabs for a gpu core, the power draw and speed that they can be ran at.
 
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