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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that it's anything but a winner-takes-all race. If anything, the lack of capacity at the top means that all of the major fabs are likely to be booked solid ahead of time by the big silicon design corps like Apple, NVIDIA, and AMD.

Think about how insane the demand is about to be for whatever NVIDIA calls their 2nm generation AI accelerators!

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What's fabbed by Samsung? Almost nothing these days. Companies won't use Samsung even when there's a TSMC shortage.

Samsung foundries cannot compete with TSMC on capacity. Regardless, they do have Nvidia and Qualcomm as customers.

I think the issues Qualcomm had at Samsung before moving to TSMC were performance and power based in addition to early yield issues.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17395/qualcomm-announces-snap...

https://www.sammobile.com/news/samsung-foundry-4nm-yield-sna...

Samsung fabs a lot of memory. You can call it less sexy than a logic chip, but between nand and ram there's a lot of it going around.

Previous Nvidia gen was on Samsung silicon iirc.

A100 was TSMC N7[1]; only consumer Ampere was Samsung 8N.

[1] https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-ampere-architecture...

"only" for one of their best selling series.

The story underlying "best selling series" is buried in details that your 1-liner quip conveniently ignores.

To close FY23, Nvidia reported[1] -27% YoY gaming segment revenue decline, while data center segment saw +41% YoY revenue growth to overtake gaming segment revenue contributions by 65%. -8% YoY gross margin contraction was largely attributed to $2.17 billion Ampere inventory glut in excess of demand expectations.

Take a wild guess which segment accounts for the lion's share of this Ampere inventory glut.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1045810/000104581023...

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