Faster, probably not by much, but it would have been a lot more power efficient. And yes, they have literally saved a few bucks per chip, you can use a wafer calculator and look up estimated prices for TSMC and Samsung and see for yourself. Of course all of this seems dumb and a mystery to people who don't anything about this, I don't blame you for believing that.
But then what's the alternative ? Say Samsung's node is fucking amazing as you think it is, the massive gap in efficiency between them and AMD must be explained somehow and the only other explanation is that instead of the node being garbage their architecture is garbage.
And by the way the "process made specifically for Nvidia" is actually the high performance version of Samsung's 8nm node, the same way 12nm was just TSMC's 16nm.
I never said Samsung node is amazing, TSMC had lot of funding from Apple alone and they had a huge advantage vs Samsung in terms of yield and experience due to multiple contracts. I know it is an extension of 10nm, it also doesn't use EUV like 7N. I'm talking only on the performance side. Not efficiency. On top the 7N is more denser than 8N, their GPU temp for throttling (13Mhz clock drop) is now at 88C, dunno if going for 7N would even reduce that or not and how it will help the performance considering all the facts that Nvidia thought of including AMD's competition, Supply & Demand of 7N and others.
And I don't know where to calculate the prices for the wafers and all, not much into that but when a quick google search I got these below
"In other words, in the best of cases NVIDIA would be paying
$ 5,600 per wafer." - Samsung 8N (
Article that mentions this along with more details incl. perf vs nodes)
Here's TSMC price of the 7N wafer cost from the
leaker that we all know ~$9300 / wafer.
On top of all this, Nvidia's Ampere never seemed to put insane focus on Rasterization performance considering how they were approaching the HPC side of things since Volta, I think it was apparent since they put out the details and leaks & their changes to the FP32 compute too.