The reason why Nvidia is buying now does not have to do anything with Arc or GPU competition. There are mainly two reasons.

1) This year, Intel, TSMC, and Samsung announced their latest factories' yields. Intel was the earliest, with 18A, while Samsung was the most recent. TSMC yieled above 60%, Intel below 60%, and Samsung around 50% (but Samsung's tech is basically a generation ahead and technically more precise), and Samsung could improve their yields the most due to the way set up the processes, where 70% is the target. Until last year, Samsung was in the second place, and with the idea that Intel caught up so fast and taking Samsung's position at least for this year, Nvidia bought Intel's stock since it's been getting cheaper since COVID.

2) It's just generally good to diversify into your competitors. Every company does this, especially when the price is cheap.

▲ cherioo 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

I am curious where you get your information about Samsung being more “precise”.

I was recently looking into 2nm myself, and based on wikipedia article on 2nm, TSMC 2nm is about 50% more dense than the samsung and intel equivalent. They aren’t remotely the same thing. Samsung 2nm and Intel 18A are about as dense as TSMC 3nm, that’s been in production for years.

▲ tiffanyh 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

This information is a bit dated but ...

Since "nm" is meaningless these days, the transistor count/mm2 is below.

As reference: TSMC 3nm is ~290 million transistors/mm2 (MTr/mm2).

             IBM      TSMC   Intel   Samsung
  22nm                       16.50  
  16nm/14nm          28.88   44.67   33.32
  10nm               52.51  100.76   51.82
  7nm                91.20  237.18   95.08
  5nm               171.30    
  3nm               292.21    
  2nm        333.33

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27063034

https://www.techradar.com/news/ibm-unveils-worlds-first-2nm-...

	▲	cherioo 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think the intel 7nm is unrealistic. If true intel wouldn’t be “behind” According to Wikipedia intel 7nm density is ~62 MTr/mm2. I cannot find the source wikichip page mentioned in your reference post. FWIW, I am not in the semi industry and all my info are from Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_nm_process https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_nm_process

▲ ac29 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> I was recently looking into 2nm myself, and based on wikipedia article on 2nm, TSMC 2nm is about 50% more dense than the samsung and intel equivalent.

I did the math on TSMC N2 vs Intel 18A, and the former is 30% denser according to TSMC

▲ sfilmeyer 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>2) It's just generally good to diversify into your competitors. Every company does this, especially when the price is cheap.

This definitely isn't a thing that every company does (or even close to every company).

	▲	adabyron 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Not every company, but the largest ones do. Microsoft once owned a decent amount of Apple & Facebook for example.

▲ a1371 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

While #2 is true, there are a myriad of ways to do that without a press release.

▲ calmoo 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> but Samsung's tech is basically a generation ahead and technically more precise

Are you comparing Samsung against Intel here specifically, or also TSMC?

▲ hypercube33 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Didn't Japanese camera makers do this and it pushed Olympus' board members to force the selloff of that division?

▲ tester756 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

How do you know Intel 18A yield if this is one of the biggest secrets?