Nvidia never to return to TSMC?

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Epyon

[H]ard|Gawd
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With all the talk of tsmc not wanting to work with nvidia you think they will ever be able to go back? I am locked to nvidia because 3d render programs do not yet support amd.
 
Don't read too much into gossip-drama mills. Nvidia's top Ampere GPU, the one powering the 7th most powerful [known] Supercomputer in the world (and the second most powerful commercial supercomputer, for that matter) is fabbed exclusively at TSMC on their 7nm node.
 
As far as I can tell, all Turing cards GPUs came from TSMC, I am sure TSMC made a significant amount of money from making them for Nvidia. I would think Nvidia and TSMC are business partners and not patty cake players. You don't have to like your customer or the customer liking you, hate each other, doesn't matter, a business deal that you both win out on is a win win regardless how much one is an asshole. If Samsung had a better deal for Nvidia on a given item, great! Great business deals are normally not based on emotional feelings in general, some are.
 
With all the talk of tsmc not wanting to work with nvidia you think they will ever be able to go back? I am locked to nvidia because 3d render programs do not yet support amd.

There is no talk of TSMC not wanting to work with nvidia. It’s just random ramblings on forums from people who don’t know what they’re talking about.
 
Neither gives a shit. Manufacturer has capacity. Manufacturer sells capacity to person paying highest amount. Person paying pays the least amount it can to deliver with a quality managed contract.

Demand / Supply planning is a profession, and being good at it is a differentiator for tech firms. The profession doesn’t care about anything other than business. Cost and reliability. That’s pretty much it. Companies buying only care if they are constrained because demand can’t be met. Usually it’s defect rate or supply capacity, in this case more technical factors may be at play, if you can’t do something and it impacts your product that’s a problem.

flip side being, things like margins and cost. It’s entirely possible companies will loss lead supply to create revenue and experience to improve. If it’s cheap enough it’s a whole lens to good enough.

Too many people put way too much of an emotional lens to it. If you run any notably large company, you have to be inherently cutthroat.
 
Neither gives a shit. Manufacturer has capacity. Manufacturer sells capacity to person paying highest amount. Person paying pays the least amount it can to deliver with a quality managed contract.

...

Too many people put way too much of an emotional lens to it. If you run any notably large company, you have to be inherently cutthroat.

This.

People need to stop thinking big business works like teenage drama queens. People have watched too much "reality" TV and think that is how the real world works. It doesn't.

Next they need to start ignoring YT clickbait that feeds these fantasies.

Big companies will have have one department involved in billion dollar lawsuit against another company, while other departments continue doing productive business with them. This isn't a high school clique where "We hate that guy and forbid hanging out with them".

We will never know why NVidia chose Samsung, unless they tell us, but those inclined toward drama stories wouldn't believe them anyway. Because there wouldn't be enough drama in the real story.

Which is probably something like they tested both processes, found minimal differences and Samsung offered them a better price. Because why believe normal sensible business operation, when you can believe Drama !!!!
 
This.

People need to stop thinking big business works like teenage drama queens.
[...]
Big companies will have have one department involved in billion dollar lawsuit against another company, while other departments continue doing productive business with them. This isn't a high school clique where "We hate that guy and forbid hanging out with them".


I wish I could like ^ more than once.

I’ve been involved in literally that example too, pretty much anyone who has had Broadcom / Qualcomm / Samsung / Intel (spot a theme?) as a supplier has. (Aside: The sheer number of Chinese walls Samsung must have boggles my mind)

Even when you straddle the two worlds you get your little competitive nature, but at the end of the day you compartmentalise. Just makes the wins a bit sweeter.

Intererestingly though, the slightly naive / emotive view expressed here comes up a lot at the more junior levels where that ability to compartmentalise hasn’t developed yet. That leads you into the whole relationship management thing, yet another art form crucial to the whole dealeo.

I know executive compensation is a sore point and is often ridiculous, but the myriad, competing, factors in a large company blow your frickin mind.

There’s a reason I couldn’t be bothered with it anymore. I like human and rational. It’s actually nice to just turn work down because a company / person is a dickhead.
 
Company A: "Didn't like Company B last time."
<12 minutes later>
Company B: "Hey, we have a thing, want to make money with us?"
Company A: "YES!"

We really need to stop attributing human grudges to corporations. They don't work like that. Also - big companies really aren't as cohesive as many think. It's a federation of groups.

I can't tell you how many times I worked with "my competitor" on a project which made us both crazy money, even if another group in both our companies was in a knife-fight. That's how it goes.
 
This.

People need to stop thinking big business works like teenage drama queens. People have watched too much "reality" TV and think that is how the real world works. It doesn't.

Next they need to start ignoring YT clickbait that feeds these fantasies.

Big companies will have have one department involved in billion dollar lawsuit against another company, while other departments continue doing productive business with them. This isn't a high school clique where "We hate that guy and forbid hanging out with them".

We will never know why NVidia chose Samsung, unless they tell us, but those inclined toward drama stories wouldn't believe them anyway. Because there wouldn't be enough drama in the real story.

Which is probably something like they tested both processes, found minimal differences and Samsung offered them a better price. Because why believe normal sensible business operation, when you can believe Drama !!!!
I would say TSMC making CPUs for AMD is more lucrative than making GPU's for Nvidia. In other words AMD can pay a hell a lot more per die area. A 3960x sells for roughly $1500, same price as a 3090 from Nvidia which has a board, memory, cooler, hundreds of other components, how much can Nvidia really pay TSMC for that die and make that card? While TSMC can make smaller chiplets for AMD at way higher margins. If you only have so much capacity, highest bidder wins. AMD can out bid Nvidia is how I see it and sideline Nvidia somewhat.
 
This.

People need to stop thinking big business works like teenage drama queens. People have watched too much "reality" TV and think that is how the real world works. It doesn't.

Next they need to start ignoring YT clickbait that feeds these fantasies.

Big companies will have have one department involved in billion dollar lawsuit against another company, while other departments continue doing productive business with them. This isn't a high school clique where "We hate that guy and forbid hanging out with them".

We will never know why NVidia chose Samsung, unless they tell us, but those inclined toward drama stories wouldn't believe them anyway. Because there wouldn't be enough drama in the real story.

Which is probably something like they tested both processes, found minimal differences and Samsung offered them a better price. Because why believe normal sensible business operation, when you can believe Drama !!!!
You mean RL isn't like "The Apprentice"?

My reality is shattered!
 
Company A: "Didn't like Company B last time."
<12 minutes later>
Company B: "Hey, we have a thing, want to make money with us?"
Company A: "YES!"

We really need to stop attributing human grudges to corporations. They don't work like that. Also - big companies really aren't as cohesive as many think. It's a federation of groups.

I can't tell you how many times I worked with "my competitor" on a project which made us both crazy money, even if another group in both our companies was in a knife-fight. That's how it goes.
Yeah, you guys say this and that about companies not holding grudges.... Then there is the reality that some do. Look at Apple, still no plans to use Nvidia after how many years of a superior product? They rubbed them wrong long ago and aren't going back to let it happen again. Companies do and continue to block other companies that don't treat then how they feel they should (whether they are right or wrong). Look how long it took Ford to start using Bridgestone tires again.... And that was mostly Fords own engineers cutting corners! No, not every little thing that happens is a deal breaker, but sometimes they do get blacklisted even if you guys don't want to beleive it. These are just 2 examples, but there are plenty more. Piss in someone's Cheerios and they don't come running back for the next project regardless of how "mature" businesses are. Nvidia is known to do this (apple, microsoft, who knows about others we haven't heard about). It's not hard for me to imagine they could have pissed someone off.
 
With all the talk of tsmc not wanting to work with nvidia you think they will ever be able to go back? I am locked to nvidia because 3d render programs do not yet support amd.

Sounds like bullshit to me. Allocation is limited at TSMC so nvidia is using it for enterprise while consumer GPUs are built at Samsung.
 
Yeah, you guys say this and that about companies not holding grudges....

The way supply chain works in tech is basically like this.

Most reasonably large technology organisation puts a specification together that says I want this many parts, of this type, on this delivery schedule.

That is given to suppliers that might be able to deliver it, they respond, negotiations happen, terms are established, including liquidated damages for failure to deliver.

If it’s a cheap thing then it’s sent to a ton of oems. If it is a commodity thing then it is usually sourced from multiple suppliers for competitive tension. If it is an expensive or complicated thing then failure to deliver because of defect rate or similar is expensive for the supplier.

Sometimes companies will sign exclusive supply contracts, usually because they want to share development costs when something is at the edge of possible, sometimes companies do in fact refuse to do business with a supplier because they mess up.

Apple quite famously is an absolute animal with that last one. They’ve bankrupted suppliers for messing up. They also are increasingly taking hold of their supply chain to guarantee quality.

So yes, sometimes it is because you refuse to do business. More often it just appears that youdo, because someone can’t practically deliver, ever.

Where someone IS taken off a supplier list, is generally because of egregious defects, leaks or because the relationship was tarnished beyond repair. Which is usually failure to deliver, failure to fix, failure to pay or very rarely human factors.

Unless TSMC failed nvidia so hard that it wasn’t commercially viable from both sides to fix it, nvidia wouldn’t take them off the supplier list. Unless nvidia didn’t Pay, TSMC would still sell to them. If TSMC had heaps of supply capacity and were not on nvidias supplier list (they are), they might loss lead to fix the relationship.

Fundamentally though, If there was not capacity available that nvidia was willing to pay more than someone else for, then TSMC won’t sell to them. The big boys can and do just come in and effectively co-opt suppliers who can do good things, sometimes for years at a time.

There we go. Tech Supply chain 101. Being good at this is literally a differentiator for a tech firm and that competence is worth billions and sometimes 10s of billions to those firms. It’s incredibly cut throat because of that and so is actually one of the last places you will see emotion play out.

Written on phone so apologies for typos
 
The way supply chain works in tech is basically like this.

Most reasonably large technology organisation puts a specification together that says I want this many parts, of this type, on this delivery schedule.

That is given to suppliers that might be able to deliver it, they respond, negotiations happen, terms are established, including liquidated damages for failure to deliver.

If it’s a cheap thing then it’s sent to a ton of oems. If it is a commodity thing then it is usually sourced from multiple suppliers for competitive tension. If it is an expensive or complicated thing then failure to deliver because of defect rate or similar is expensive for the supplier.

Sometimes companies will sign exclusive supply contracts, usually because they want to share development costs when something is at the edge of possible, sometimes companies do in fact refuse to do business with a supplier because they mess up.

Apple quite famously is an absolute animal with that last one. They’ve bankrupted suppliers for messing up. They also are increasingly taking hold of their supply chain to guarantee quality.

So yes, sometimes it is because you refuse to do business. More often it just appears that youdo, because someone can’t practically deliver, ever.

Where someone IS taken off a supplier list, is generally because of egregious defects, leaks or because the relationship was tarnished beyond repair. Which is usually failure to deliver, failure to fix, failure to pay or very rarely human factors.

Unless TSMC failed nvidia so hard that it wasn’t commercially viable from both sides to fix it, nvidia wouldn’t take them off the supplier list. Unless nvidia didn’t Pay, TSMC would still sell to them. If TSMC had heaps of supply capacity and were not on nvidias supplier list (they are), they might loss lead to fix the relationship.

Fundamentally though, If there was not capacity available that nvidia was willing to pay more than someone else for, then TSMC won’t sell to them. The big boys can and do just come in and effectively co-opt suppliers who can do good things, sometimes for years at a time.

There we go. Tech Supply chain 101. Being good at this is literally a differentiator for a tech firm and that competence is worth billions and sometimes 10s of billions to those firms. It’s incredibly cut throat because of that and so is actually one of the last places you will see emotion play out.

Written on phone so apologies for typos
So, that was a lot to say just to basically agree that some companies will and do hold grudges and refuse to do work with them when they have disagreements.

I have no clue if TSMC and NVIDIA have any beef. My assumption is they felt that had a better deal and/or enough supply going with Samsung. I don't think it was TSMC failing nvidia seeing as they are still making their much more expensive server parts. This alone points to it was just a business decision from NVIDIA based on cost per unit vs. what they would have gained. My point was that people do in fact get themselves into trouble by either making mistakes or handling things poorly. Everyone else in the thread was acting like this stuff never happened and I was just giving counter examples. I understand how business work and realize that most of these contracts where in place long before any products were even starting design work for whatever node it was chosen to be on. I also know that NVIDIA is good at pissing people off as has been shown in the past. If you're telling me that if you had 2 good options and one crapped on you and one was a pleasure to work with, that there isn't going to be any leaning at all from anyone? Absolutely it has some bearing, how much will depend on so many factors (how bad was it, how much $$ difference between the two is there, what was the response to the screw up, etc, etc), but it absolutely can and will be a factor.
 
So you took the one line out to say sometimes it can be a ‘grudge’. It can, it hardly ever is.
Especially in tech.

Supply chain VPs would sell their grandmother for parts if the price was right and it got them their bonus.

Short enough?
 
I think the point is that it is a mistake to attribute emotions to an entity which cannot and does not have emotions. It exists to make money. Show a way for it to make more money, and it will.

Harming a partner or causing difficulty doesn't make them less likely to select you Because Grudge. It's because the partner or parts were expensive, faulty, harmed their marketing/brand, or cumbersome to work with - all of which have financial implications.
 
Bottom line: if you have first hand information to share on this topic instead of wild speculation, please let me know and I will open the thread for informed input.
 
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