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aurareturn • yesterday at 8:39 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

  Nvidia’s chips aren’t usually on the latest nodes.
Not yet. The primary reason is because most AI chips are full reticle sized which means the first year yields likely won't be very cost effective. It takes a new node a few years to fully mature in terms of yield. Little iPhone A series and server CPU chiplets are perfect for new nodes.

That said, Nvidia will certainly try to move smaller and lower volume chips in future generations to the most cutting edge node such as their CPUs, networking chips. Vera Rubin has 7 unique chips. They don't need be all on the same node, and they're not.

AMD is taking up much of the N2 supply with their Epyc CPUs this year. There is no doubt in my mind that Nvidia, ARM, Graviton will try to book as much of the most cutting edge node as possible for their future enterprise CPUs given that AMD has done it for N2. I can see enterprise CPUs becoming equal launch partners to TSMC nodes as Apple. Agentic AI is going to cause a huge demand increase in CPUs.

Replies

brookst • today at 2:17 AM

Agreed on all counts. Apple’s hedge with Intel makes a ton of sense, especially if they continue to pay a premium for first dibs on a significant chunk of TSMC’s newest nodes.

So far Apple has been aggressive about stopping production of older processors, but as we see with MacBook Neo, even the lowest chips are increasingly overpowered for many users.

I expect even if Intel can’t match TSMC’s latest, they’ll be able to produce one or two generations behind at low cost and high volume. (I worked at Intel for 5 years or so, that phrase would have gotten me fired back then)