March 24 news, yesterday in a telephone interview with the media, NVIDIA CEO Huang Jenxun said that he will consider turning to competitor NVIDIA to manufacture chips for it. Puzzlingly, at a media conference earlier in the day, Huang Only mentioned TSMC and Samsung when talking about the foundry.
The two-year mining tide has made many netizens who do not understand the GPU field also notice the word graphics card, a RTX 3060 Ti priced at 2999 yuan, which can rise to more than 8,000 yuan, which is enough to make many luxury goods look sideways. Seeing that selling graphics cards is so profitable, Intel, the world's largest CPU company, can't sit still and officially announces its entry into the graphics card industry.
In this way, the graphics card market has changed from NVIDIA and AMD competing for the world to a three-legged stand. Obviously, NVIDIA is the powerful Cao Wei, and AMD and Intel are Wu Shu. At present, Intel does not have a chip foundry business, but seeing that TSMC's net profit exceeds 30%, Intel is moved. At that time, TSMC founder Zhang Zhongmou also ridiculed Intel, because Intel once thought that chip foundry was too low-end, and could not make money, disdainful of chip foundry.
At present, NVIDIA's GPU chips are mainly foundry by Samsung, but Samsung's process has a certain gap with TSMC, and it was previously reported that the RTX 40 series will be changed to TSMC OEM. The question is that the chip production capacity of Samsung and TSMC simply cannot meet the needs of the market, if Samsung is left, how much capacity can TSMC provide for NVIDIA?
TSMC's main customer is Apple, the secondary customer is MediaTek, Apple is rich, MediaTek is A neighbor of TSMC, the headquarters are in Hsinchu City, Taiwan Province, and it doesn't take long to take the bus when talking about business. In contrast, NVIDIA is likely to have not had enough capacity. Therefore, NVIDIA needs Intel to also oem GPU chips for it to meet the needs of consumers.
So the question is, will Intel be willing to make chips for its competitors? Although Intel has entered the graphics card field, the product is still difficult to mass-produce for a while and needs long-term testing. Earlier, in order to carry out the chip foundry business, Intel invested a lot of money to build a factory, and now it definitely needs to recover costs. As for the relationship between competitors, selling graphics cards to make money, OEM graphics cards/GPU chips are also making money, anyway, they are the same, no different.
However, it is difficult to say which GPU chips Intel will manufacture for NVIDIA, because Intel's process technology is still lagging behind TSMC and Samsung, although the transistor density is high enough, and the 10nm process is forcibly named Intel 7, but many netizens will still feel that the process is lagging behind. This depends on NVIDIA's choice, whether to let TSMC OEM flagship GPU, Intel OEM low-end GPU.