Samsung may start making chips for AMD in 2016

Samsung’s chip manufacturing operations could be about to get some new business. In a report Tuesday citing unnamed sources, South Korea’s Electronic Times said that the Korean electronics giant would begin making CPU and GPU chips for AMD next year.

AMD currently relies on GlobalFoundries to manufacture its APUs (TSMC handles budget CPU cores, GPUs, and game console chips), but if the report is accurate, Samsung would join the Abu Dhabi-owned firm in manufacturing AMD’s Greenland GPUs and Zen CPUs in 2016. The new chips would be based on the 14nm process, which means that we can expect them to be both faster and more power efficient.

In fact, there are reports saying that Greenland, the next high-end GPU, could double the performance-per-watt of Fiji, the current flagship GPU architecture found in cards like the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X.

Despite its reputation as a smartphone giant, Samsung has seen profits from that side of its business continue to slide as Apple continues to take home the lion's share of profits. However, it has seen its semiconductor business pick up the slack – it posted a US$3.2 billion operating profit in the third quarter of this year, nearly half of the overall figure. Ironically, Samsung has Apple to partly thank for this. It manufactures a sizeable portion of chips for Apple devices, and also builds GPUs for NVIDIA and other manufacturers.

If the reports are true, Samsung would add to its burgeoning chip business, and AMD could also stand to benefit. The Korean company is expected to ship even more efficient 10nm chips by next year, which could potentially give AMD a much-needed edge over Intel, which is not expected to deliver 10nm chips until 2017.

Source: ET News via Engadget

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