Inaddition, nvidia will sell hundreds, or low thousands of those chips, while apple will sell 200 million devices this year with their latest SoC.
You are dramatically underestimating Nvidia's sales. Just in the Summit supercomputer alone, 27,600 V100s are being used. All of the Volta generation (even under $100 cards) will be based on variations of this chip. A good way to look at the size of Nvidia is to compare its percentage of TSMC 2016 sales to Apple's. Apple is #1 at 17% and Nvidia is at 5%. So Apple is selling about 3 times as many TSMC transistors. Just so you know, the bottom of the current Pascal generation, the GT 1030, is selling for $69.99, that is a full card that includes the chip so the chip must cost something like $10 to make. (That chip is made with Samsung as Nvidia uses both Samsung and TSMC to make their chips.)
Sooo...what exactly makes the 7nm chip from TSMC better than Samsung's?
TSMC 7nm is "better" because it actually exists. Qualcomm recently switched back to TSMC 7nm for future Snapdragon processors. They've been working with the technology for almost a year now. Unfortunately for Samsung is quite a bit behind in terms of schedule on 7nm because of over reliance on EUV equipment which isn't quite ready for PrimeTime yet.
Apple has used both suppliers before with better performance coming from the TSMC processors for some reason.
Perhaps Apple gets better pricing, better processors, and doesn't have to feed the mouth that bites it. Sounds like a win-win if it happens.
Pricing is less of a consideration for Apple because its product is premium. For Apple it is more of who can deliver first on my product requirement at high volume at a "reasonable" cost. For being on the bleeding edge, Apple pays a premium to fund the process development anyway.
Also one thing to consider is that there is no conflict of interest for Apple working with TSMC, which provides contract manufacturing only and supply made to order CPUs. Whereas Samsung which also produces CPU on its Galaxy line that competes against Apple iOS devices. There is always a concern that Apple IP might be leaked to Samsung mobile.
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