Rumor: Samsung Foundry to Produce GPUs and CPUs for PCs

According to Korean media, Samsung will expand its foundry plans and gradually, on behalf of others, also produce GPUs and CPUs for PCs, as TSMC is already doing. In addition, Samsung’s own core for smartphone socs would be available early next year.

The vice chairman of Samsung is said to have ordered the strengthening of Samsung’s capabilities to produce a wider variety of semiconductor components, Business Korea reports. Currently, the Korean company’s foundry focuses on producing mobile processors, but gradually CPUs and GPUs should be added on behalf of third parties. With this, Samsung would intensify competition with the Taiwanese TSMC, but also become a bigger competitor to Intel. The group is said to have entered into licensing deals with STMicroelectronics for its plans.

Samsung is also designing its own cores for mobile socs, the company announced at the end of 2013. The latest Exynos-soc has a 64-bit core from ARM, but in the future Exynos-socs will have cores designed by Samsung itself. There should be results in this area by the first quarter of 2016 at the latest.

Samsung has been expanding its foundry business for some time now. To this end, it has entered into an extensive partnership with GlobalFoundries. Samsung produces the Exynos soc of the Galaxy S6 on its own 14nm FinFET process and is thus ahead of its closest competitor TSMC. It is reported that Apple, Nvidia and Qualcomm, among others, have therefore partnered with Samsung for the production of their mobile processors.