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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

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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