Nvidia preferred to renew its trust in Samsung rather than switch to TSMC to produce the future RTX 3000 Super, the future overclocked variants of the lineup – despite initial performance issues. The TSMC founder obviously already has too many controls on his hands …
The business daily Korea Economic Daily reveals that Samsung has won the contract to manufacture the GPUs of future Nvidia RTX 3000 series SUPER cards. The founder will engrave the GPUs in 8 nm in its factory in Hwaesong. This is the second deal signed between Nvidia and Samsung Foundry since September. And the game was far from won.
Samsung has indeed suffered from performance issues on its 8nm Note which constrained the supply of RTX 3000 cards against a background of particularly strong demand. Nvidia was therefore expected to turn to Taiwanese founder TSMC. However, the latter already subcontracts the manufacture of many components for other industry leaders: SoCs for PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles, iPhone chips, new M1 macs, AMD chips (CPU and GPU) but also part of the production of Qualcomm, Broadcom, Marvell, or even MediaTek.
Moreover, we learn in Korea Economic Daily that according to sources familiar with the matter, what led Nvidia to ultimately choose Samsung is the founder’s ability to fulfill orders faster. It must be said that Samsung has made heavy investments in its 8nm / EUV production lines to address the initial performance issues. The firm has also replaced Samsung Foundry executive with Choi Si-young, with a mission to narrow the gap with TSMC in the coming years.
Read also: Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070, 3080 and 3090 – date, price, technical sheet, all about graphics cards
The new director of Samsung Foundry explains that this gap will be reduced particularly when the first 4 nm node chips arrive on the market. The firm has also bought land near a production unit in Austin, Texas, which appears to confirm that the group is in the process of expanding into silicon manufacturing. Samsung would invest some 10,000 billion Won (6.54 billion euros) per year to achieve its objectives.
Source: The Korea Economic Daily
