Nvidia CEO: We're open to Intel making our chips Nvidia is considering expanding its supplier base by getting at least some of its chips made in Intel factories. "They're interested in us using their foundries," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang regarding Intel, during a virtual press conference on Wednesday. "We're very interested in exploring it." Demand for Nvidia's GPUs has …
As Samsung demonstrate year in, year out you can make a good living just ‘being the supply chain’… which is good baseload for your business, drives economies of scale, has some bitter irony for companies like Apple needing to use them. It’s also good if your own products have a lean year or an unforeseen hiccup - Note 7 debacle comes to mind.
I think it’s an impossible task for Intel however as they can barely fab the leading edge for themselves. Culturally and practicality.
NVIDIA currently uses an 8nm process for their consumer dGPUs. That is hardly leading edge and by the time the next generation is available, they will still be behind the curve. Quantity matters just as much as quality when dealing with mass market consumer electronics.
But does the latest process really matter that much?
Surely if you already own the fab and aren't upgrading it then you can immediately knock out a large number of graphics cards that match whatever process is being used. Since there appears to be a large shortage of graphics cards, presumably whatever is made will sell if you pitch it at the right price point.
> Nvidia is trying to book as much factory capacity it can, Intel is investing billions to build advanced factories in the US and Europe. Supply, meet demand; demand, meet supply.
The current surge in demand with low supply sounds like the pork cycle to me:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle
Everyone is massively investing in expanding fabs. But when they actually get built, demand for chips will likely have dropped off, leaving them to compete on price to fill their excess capacity, leading to fabs being a low-margin business, and everybody closing unneeded fabs, and unwilling to invest in next-gen developments... Until there's an uptick in demand with no supply, when it suddenly becomes profitable again.
Not this time mee thinks. I just don't see a reduction in demand at this point forward. Further, fabs have to be re-architected every few years. I think the unseen problem was the demand boom coming from the micro-controller type markets. Demand for the small cheap stuff exploded, then dipped with the Covid nonsense, then re-exploded. A bunch of the new low news profile fab capacity is going to fill some of that need. The latest 1nm fab get's the headlines to make the next crazy fast mining chip, but the shortage is because everyone fabbed up to make all this high end, high profit stuff and ignored all the low end markets. They will come on line ramp up, and prices may fall briefly, until the word get's out that you can make that widget we wanted to build now, and then things will stablize. Keep in mind even an SOC has a bunch of support components to go with it. Most of that crap still comes out of china. All the high-end fabbing going in will pretty much just keep pace, with retiring old fabs, and expanding capacity to level out current demand. Intel is well aware of the cycle, has done a reasonable job of getting new fabbing online as old tech is retired. Micron, and Samsung, and so forth are in the same boat. They are constantly getting new fabbing in the pipeline, but they have to amortize out the costs sanely.
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