4 ms·
The reason why Nvidia is buying now does not have to do anything with Arc or GPU competition. There are mainly two reasons. 1) This year, Intel, TSMC, and Sams
by techsystems 1y ago
The reason why Nvidia is buying now does not have to do anything with Arc or GPU competition. There are mainly two reasons.
1) This year, Intel, TSMC, and Samsung announced their latest factories' yields. Intel was the earliest, with 18A, while Samsung was the most recent. TSMC yieled above 60%, Intel below 60%, and Samsung around 50% (but Samsung's tech is basically a generation ahead and technically more precise), and Samsung could improve their yields the most due to the way set up the processes, where 70% is the target. Until last year, Samsung was in the second place, and with the idea that Intel caught up so fast and taking Samsung's position at least for this year, Nvidia bought Intel's stock since it's been getting cheaper since COVID.
2) It's just generally good to diversify into your competitors. Every company does this, especially when the price is cheap.
- cherioo 1y agoI am curious where you get your information about Samsung being more “precise”. I was recently looking into 2nm myself, and based on wikipedia article on 2nm, TSMC 2nm is about 50% more dense than the samsung and intel equivalent. They aren’t remotely the same thing. Samsung 2nm and Intel 18A are about as dense as TSMC 3nm, that’s been in production for years.
- tiffanyh 1y agoThis information is a bit dated but ... Since "nm" is meaningless these days, the transistor count/mm2 is below. As reference: TSMC 3nm is ~290 million transistors/mm2 (MTr/mm2). IBM TSMC Intel Samsung 22nm 16.50 16nm/14nm 28.88 44.67 33.32 10nm 52.51 100.76 51.82 7nm 91.20 237.18 95.08 5nm 171.30 3nm 292.21 2nm 333.33 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063034 https://www.techradar.com/news/ibm-unveils-worlds-first-2nm-chip https://www.techradar.com/news/ibm-unveils-worlds-first-2nm-...
- cherioo 1y agoI think the intel 7nm is unrealistic. If true intel wouldn’t be “behind” According to Wikipedia intel 7nm density is ~62 MTr/mm2. I cannot find the source wikichip page mentioned in your reference post. FWIW, I am not in the semi industry and all my info are from Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_nm_process https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_nm_process
- ac29 1y ago> I was recently looking into 2nm myself, and based on wikipedia article on 2nm, TSMC 2nm is about 50% more dense than the samsung and intel equivalent. I did the math on TSMC N2 vs Intel 18A, and the former is 30% denser according to TSMC
- tester756 1y agoHow do you know Intel 18A yield if this is one of the biggest secrets?
- sfilmeyer 1y ago>2) It's just generally good to diversify into your competitors. Every company does this, especially when the price is cheap. This definitely isn't a thing that every company does (or even close to every company).
- adabyron 1y agoNot every company, but the largest ones do. Microsoft once owned a decent amount of Apple & Facebook for example.
- hypercube33 1y agoDidn't Japanese camera makers do this and it pushed Olympus' board members to force the selloff of that division?
- calmoo 1y ago> but Samsung's tech is basically a generation ahead and technically more precise Are you comparing Samsung against Intel here specifically, or also TSMC?
- a1371 1y agoWhile #2 is true, there are a myriad of ways to do that without a press release.