NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3090, RTX 3080, RTX 3070: 7nm node, not 8nm

It has been an absolutely insane 24 hours for leaks on NVIDIA's next-gen Ampere-based GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards -- so much so that I can't even keep up and I'm glued to my desk nearly 18 hours a day.

Well, thankfully it pays off sometimes like seeing VideoCardz posting GAINWARD's leaked GeForce RTX 30 series Phoenix-branded graphics cards. In the specifications you can see above, it lists that the process node is 7nm -- not the 8nm that we've been hearing for a couple of months now.

This is an interesting note, and something that might just seem like a number -- but a simple change from 8nm to 7nm can mean the world. It opens up various questions that need to be answered: were the 8nm rumors ever true, or has NVIDIA used Samsung's 7nm for its first wave of cards?

• Samsung began work on a new 7nm plant in South Korea in February 2018, which was meant to mass producing 7nm chips by 2019.
• It was reported that TSMC would handle most of NVIDIA's new 7nm GPU production, and that Samsung woulod only handle a small portion of it -- this happened in December 2019.
• But then leaker kopite7kimi tweeted in early July 2020 that the new Ampere gaming GPUs were "100% Samsung 8nm". That is when everything changed, and the big 8nm rumor mill starting spooling up to maximum speed -- until it hit a huge brick wall with these new GAINWARD leaks.