As per one source over at the South Korean tech forum Clien, AMD is reportedly planning to shift some of its chip production to Samsung, coming via Harukaze5719 (Twitter). Although the tech forum Clien has given us accurate predictions before, it is an open forum where anyone can post unverified claims.
The user in question has a strong track record of accurate predictions in the past though, but you should still exercise some caution with any leak or rumor.
With that being said, the leaker claims that AMD plans to outsource some of its lower ASP chip products to Samsung’s foundries, instead of relying on TSMC’s 7 nm process, where the company already fabricates its Zen 3, RDNA 2, EPYC lineup, and custom silicon solutions for latest-gen consoles.
AMD wants to increase production capacity by 50% or more, but obtaining production capacity from TSMC remains difficult, and TSMC has been unable to keep up due to prior commitments.
Therefore, AMD might consider having some of the GPUs and APUs baked by Samsung instead. AMD might leverage Samsung’s 8 nm or even smaller fabrication process nodes, to manufacture some of its future APUs and GPUs.
Since this is about production of the chips at both TSMC and Samsung, which means that there may be differences between the Samsung and TSMC dies.
TSMC has been having a hard time scaling its production facilities lately due to unprecedented demand from its consumers. The problem is that TSMC has to meet Apple’s huge demand, and Apple is said to have already secured the full 5nm production capacity as early as last summer, and TSMC’s 3nm node would also be likely prioritized for Apple.
However, it was reported last year in August 2020 that AMD would replace Apple as TSMC’s largest customer, at least in terms of quantity of wafers. Most of the businesses outsource their wafer production to TSMC’s factories and manufacturing processes, so this puts up a lot of strain on the production lines.
However, AMD is still weighing its options before committing to Samsung. Because shifting production to a new fab can be cost-intensive, and AMD could be better off by having some minor losses incurred by reduced volumes instead.
TSMC is also soliciting Apple and Intel’s help for its 2nm node’s research, so these companies will be given a much higher priority compared to AMD. It is still not very clear which production process or production processes are involved here.
But future AMD GPU/APU lines could be manufactured by Samsung. It remains to be seen if this comes to fruition or not, but AMD does have an agreement with Samsung for licensing the company’s mobile Exynos chips (to integrate the RDNA graphics architecture onto these Exynos chips).
Stay tuned for more tech news!
Hello, my name is NICK Richardson. I’m an avid PC and tech fan since the good old days of RIVA TNT2, and 3DFX interactive “Voodoo” gaming cards. I love playing mostly First-person shooters, and I’m a die-hard fan of this FPS genre, since the good ‘old Doom and Wolfenstein days.
MUSIC has always been my passion/roots, but I started gaming “casually” when I was young on Nvidia’s GeForce3 series of cards. I’m by no means an avid or a hardcore gamer though, but I just love stuff related to the PC, Games, and technology in general. I’ve been involved with many indie Metal bands worldwide, and have helped them promote their albums in record labels. I’m a very broad-minded down to earth guy. MUSIC is my inner expression, and soul.
Contact: Email
I’m not surprised; if fact, I was wondering why they didn’t tap them a bit sooner, since Samsung’s 8nm is only a bit inferior but plenty sufficient for mid-range and lower.
That being said, it’s still a shame that GloFo never did risk 7nm; their was showing more potential than TSMC’s in early testing, and they could have also joined AMD in a financial revival. I do wonder if they will reconsider in the coming years; as 7nm is going to remain in demand for the foreseeable future.
I’ve been saying a while that AMD needed to diversify their fab contracts. Their growth is hard capped at what they can get from TSMC right now, and they are competing not only with Apple and Qualcomm but now Intel as well for that limited TSMC capacity.
Is there any indication TSMC is going to build more fabs? It’s crazy for a company to be rate limiting themselves when they are so in demand. I know it takes years to build a fab, but surely they can’t be so stupid to have not had any forward planning.
This didn’t just happen overnight. What happened to global foundries are they not in the picture at all anymore?
they will build more but TSMC most likely play it safe and will make moves that can maximize their profit. for sure they want to keep the wafer price at all time high as well. just look what happen with DRAM market before. DRAM maker increase their volume production significantly and then price also drops quite significantly. plus there is also issues like huawei before.
as for GF they decided to focus less on bleeding edge node. they cancel their initial 7nm plan and doing something else. it is one of the reason why AMD end up going with TSMC on all their products.
ALL tech companies need to get off their a*se and increase their fabrication ability.
This electronics drought is unprecedented.
Can someone explain to me how can AMD outsource anything when it doesn’t manufacture anything?
Supply and demand. Why risk additional investment towards capacity when they instead can charge more with what you already have. Tsmc needs competition and it shows. Say what you want but nvidia probably saw this coming and knew it was just getting worse and likely even more soo soon. Seems amd also have started to see the dangers of having just one supplier that basically controls the market (and thus the prices/volumes)