The Korea Economic Daily has learned that Samsung has managed to win a second contract to manufacture NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics cards. Considering those rumors of Samsung’s 8 nm yields being worse than expected and directly contributing to the lack of stock on the market, this is a pretty surprising development, but evidently, NVIDIA wants to avoid dealing with TSMC.
“Analysts said the contract is significant in that Samsung won the deal amid market talk that Nvidia’s new GPU has been in tight supply due to unsatisfactory 8 nm process yield rates at its foundry partner Samsung, raising speculation that the US company may award the contract to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the industry leader,” The Korea Economic Daily reported.
“Industry officials said Nvidia has favored Samsung over TSMC in consideration of Samsung’s technology and the need for quick delivery of the chips. The RTX3080, priced at $699, the same as its previous model, has been in high demand because of its faster data processing speed.”
There’s an implication here that Samsung’s 8 nm process is equally as good as TSMC’s 7 nm, but we’re guessing that NVIDIA’s decision to stick with the Korean giant has more to do with availability. Luckily, rumors suggest that NVIDIA has already pre-booked TSMC’s 5 nm production capacity for what is believed to be the GeForce RTX 4000 Series.