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Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia isn't a fab. AMD isn't a fab. TSMC is the fab that beat Intel. TSMC's customers, like AMD and NVidia, are beneficiaries.

So far. As customers of TSMC, in the long term it behooves them for TSMC to have competition.

Further, "leadership matters" is a somewhat ironic complaint given that Intel ran face-first into a brick wall precisely because they were leading. TSMC placed conservative bets on the next node and Intel placed risky bets because they needed the extra risk/reward to maintain leadership. Intel's bets failed (in particular, cobalt wires and COAG). They chose "leadership or bust" and went "bust," at least for now.

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This is such a simpleton take.

The whole reason AMD are able to crank out 128 core CPUs is the CCX architecture - the one people laughed at. No TSMC there. Not to mention other innovations like Infinity Fabric.

In ampere for instance, there are so many innovations, like PAM signalling, 2x shader instructions per clock, DLSS, RTX Voice.

TSMC beat Intel, sure, but that is not the main reason for why Nvidia and even AMD are leading the industry. In fact, ampere is on Samsung 8n.

No need for name calling...

I see you're new here ...

Just fyi, steer clear of the ad hominems. You can disagree with someone without calling them a simpleton.

'gallerdude didn't mention anything about fabs. Also, these GPUs are fabricated at Samsung, so your comments about TSMC are mostly irrelevant.

If the fab was all that mattered, AMD GPUs would be dominating Nvidia, since they have been shipping GPUs using TSMC 7nm (a superior process to Samsung 8nm) for over a year.

> As customers of TSMC, in the long term it behooves them for TSMC to have competition.

Sure, but it is not like Intel is going to fab AMD and nvidia chips, so they need other competitors, like Samsung, and that's what they are using.

In this case Nvidia said they're using Samsung's "8N" process.

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