AMD could be taking a page out of NVIDIA’s Ampere playbook and recruiting Samsung to manufacture some of its next-generation Radeon GPUs.
The possibility stems from a market analysis report shared by J.P. Morgan this week, which includes a section speculating what AMD might be planning in light of TSMC’s limited and highly sought-after capacity, a lot of which is seemingly prioritized for major rivals such as Apple. AMD is expected to consider adopting Samsung’s three-nanometer process for some of its GPUs in 2023 or 2024, according to the market research, which also suggested that Samsung would be responsible for an upcoming four-nanometer CPU destined for Chromebooks.
From the report:
AMD – likely some chips going to Samsung, but low volume: Our research indicates that AMD is likely to outsource a Chromebook CPU to Samsung on its 4 nm (likely mass production in late 2022), and TSMC may have limited capacity to allocate for Chromebook projects, given the declining market demand. In addition, we believe that AMD is likely to also evaluate some projects (probably for GPU) at Samsung 3 nm in 2023/24, but vast majority of its core platforms (CPUs for server, mobile, and desktops) are likely to stay with TSMC N3 even in the 3 nm era. Note that AMD’s N3 devices are likely to ramp up only in 2024, given that its N5 projects (Genoa and Zen 4 desktop variants) will only come to market in 2H22.
TSM | JP Morgan research Overweight analysis gives a lot of clues to the other companies’ potential plans.$TSM $AAPL $QCOM $INTC $NVDA $AMD pic.twitter.com/HY7sIDNcIT
— Marc Moeldner (@MarcTheShark83) December 7, 2021