The company who's one of TSMC's biggest clients and has a market cap bigger than Intel "cant afford" TSMC's best nodes?
I think you meant won't bother. Why produce midrange cards at cutting edge nodes?
Those nodes have a point only when going for outright performance where cost is much less of a concern.
I don't foresee AMD producing $2000+ gaming cards in the near future. Do you?
They dont? I must have missed a memo but Nvidia has been using TSMC as far as I can remember. Even collaborating on "special" nodes like 12nm for Turing.
So they went for Samsung for one generation - an outlier. Likely Samsung offered them a really good deal but Samsung's 8nm node (meant for mobile chips initially) was just bad in terms of yields and power. AMD was very competitive with RX 6000 series that used TSMC's 7nm node.
As for Intel - that wont happen in the near future. Intel's capacity is miniscule and even Intel themselves don't believe in their own node. Why else would they use TSMC for Arrow Lake GPU chiplet? And now you think Intel will produce much bigger GPU dies for Nvidia on their unproven and low volume 18A node?
They do tho. You think Nvidia would as competitive with RX 7000 series if they used TSMC's 5nm or even 6nm nodes?
AMD is about equal on raster with 4080S while using inferior 5nm/6nm node and if Nvidia used 5nm for 4090 then it would not be ~18% faster in raster compared to 7900 XTX. Nvidia's advantage is RT is more to do with compute unit allocation and architecture than node difference.
