Samsung has just officially announced some major deals signed by its chip manufacturing division. After a chaotic episode with Nvidia, Samsung is about to regain a foothold in the manufacturing market by signing deals with AMD and TESLA. According to some leaks, AMD will be adopting Intel’s strategy to date for its future Zen 5c-based processors and APUs. These will use a hybrid configuration, with TSMC engraving the chiplets containing the cores and Samsung handling the I/O chip. This is a process that AMD has mastered, since the controller of its CPUs is currently in 6 nm and the cores in 5 nm… But the whole operation is carried out at TSMC. An operation which would therefore require logistics between service providers.
Samsung Foundry’s return to the limelight should not, however, obscure reality. We can easily identify two explanations for this changeover. Firstly, availability, given that Apple has already snapped up most of TSMC’s 3nm capacity, and that Nvidia will be following suit with its next-generation graphics chips. Finally, price, as Samsung clearly needs to keep its Fabs running . Tesla, for its part, is likely to position itself on the Korean company’s 5nm node, again with a view to breaking out of its dependence on TSMC.
