Nvidia has just signed a new manufacturing deal with Samsung for 8nm processors that power their RTX 30-series GPUs, raising the possibility of some relief for some of the supply issues that consumers have faced since the launch of the RTX 3070, RTX 3080, and RTX 3090.
The deal is "worth hundreds of billions of won," and with one dollar equaling about 1,098 South Korean won, this is very likely a multibillion dollar contract. That can buy a whole lot of processors, but if you're hoping to see a flood of RTX 3080s on the digital store shelves soon, the report doesn't say what those processors are for.
While they could be used to produce enough RTX 3080s and RTX 3090s to meet the existing, unprecedented demand for the new cards, these processors could also be used in new RTX cards as well, including the RTX 3080 Ti or mobile versions of the RTX 30-series GPUs for laptops.
Without an official announcement, it's probably safer to assume that it will be a little bit of everything given the size of the contract. There's a lot of demand out there for the existing cards that needs to be met, but we also know that newer RTX 30-series cards are coming along with their mobile computing counterparts.
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New Nvidia contract gives it an advantage over rival AMD on the manufacturing front
This new contract is good news for Team Green in its ongoing battle with rival AMD. With all of the work that AMD is putting on die fabricator TSMC, PCGamer points out that there is probably very little, if any, extra bandwidth for more processors with the Taiwanese company.
By looking to Samsung, Nvidia can possibly get more of its Ampere cards to market than Team Red can with their Big Navi cards, and given the still-exorbitant demand for these next-gen GPUs, that's a huge advantage for Nvidia.
Given the possible win Nvidia could score over AMD in terms of sales, the multi-billion dollar Samsung deal looks like a very good move on Nvidia's part.
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