Thraktor
"[✄]. [✄]. [✄]. [✄]." -Microsoft
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not the first time that node or some type of Samsung node starting with 7 has been mentioned. rumours it was that or a similar node were circulating a long time back but quickly dismissed.
sounds very possible to me - we already know 8nm may not have been as bad it as seems with Lovelace efficiency improvements (that low-end card on SEC 8nm being quite efficient was a clue) so a slightly better node could work. the economics are obvious and right in-front of us - deal with Samsung to produce most of the components in the new device.
Lovelace's efficiency improvement is moving from Samsung N8 to TSMC N4. Aside from a few tweaks here and there (mainly to the RT cores) and much larger caches, Lovelace is largely a port of Ampere onto N4, and the efficiency improvements are pretty much exactly what we'd expect from the node difference. Some small things like added clock gating may make a small difference, but they're very minor in comparison to the node change.
Regarding the "Nintendo will get a good deal off Samsung if they get many parts off them" theory, which seems to come up a lot, Nintendo doesn't buy SoCs off Samsung, they buy them off Nvidia. Samsung can't give Nintendo a deal on something they're not selling them. Besides, Nvidia is already one of the largest spenders on foundry services in the world, so it's not like Nintendo need to be involved for Samsung to have an incentive to give Nvidia a good deal. Even aside from this, Samsung Foundry is functionally a separate company from Samsung Display, which is also functionally a separate company from Samsung Memory, so such a deal would be extremely complex if even possible at all.
I also don't think the "buy everything off Samsung and get a good deal" makes sense from Nintendo's perspective, even ignoring the SoC. For a device that's expected to stay on the market for a long time, like a games console, it's very important to be able to multi-source as many components as possible, to minimise dependency on individual suppliers and allow costs to be reduced over time. The two components Samsung would be most likely to contribute, RAM and storage, are also the two components which are easiest to multi-source, as LPDDR and UFS are commoditised, and there's no reason to lock yourself into a single supplier for either of them. If they were to go with an OLED screen, then they may lock themselves into a deal with Samsung just from practicality's sake, as there are so few suppliers, but screens are something they'd like to multi-source if at all possible (and may be a reason for them to launch with an LCD panel).
Even the indication that Samsung will be making Switch 2 game cards is pointing away from exclusive deals with individual suppliers. Nintendo were effectively locked into a single supplier for Switch game cards (Macronix/MegaChips), and evidence points to them multi-sourcing from both Samsung and Macronix for Switch 2.