Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then why wouldn't they just make more of them? The excuse is supposed to be fab capacity, but the 3070 has better performance than the 4060 etc. and is built on the older process which should no longer be in short supply.
Then why wouldn't they just make more of them? The excuse is supposed to be fab capacity, but the 3070 has better performance than the 4060 etc. and is built on the older process which should no longer be in short supply. There is actually very little margins in the midrange consumer discrete GPU market. The market for discrete GPUs have been shrinking since the mid 2000s.[0] Most GPUs are sold as integrated such as…
But those are mostly AMD, and doesn't really have anything to do with what features someone puts on their discrete gaming cards, except insofar as it implies gamers don't need the cards some amateur ML hobbyist might buy.
> In a shrinking market, the midrange and low-end products will cease to be profitable.
That's assuming the products have high independent development costs, but that isn't really the case. The low end products are essentially the high end products with fewer cores which use correspondingly less silicon -- which have higher yields because you don't need such a large area of perfect silicon or can sell a defective die as a slower part by disabling the defective section, making them profitable with a smaller margin per unit die area.
> Furthermore, node advancements have stopped scaling $/transistor. So the transistors aren't getting cheaper, just smaller.
Which implies that they can profitably continue producing almost-as-good GPUs on the older process node.
> Lastly, Nvidia wants to allocate every last wafer they pre-purchased from TSMC to their server GPUs.
Which is why the proposal is for them to make as many GPUs as the gamers could want at Samsung.