Rumor: Samsung will produce AMD GPU at 14nm

According to Korean rumors, Samsung has brought in AMD as a major partner and will not only produce APUs but also GPUs on its second generation 14nm process. This should happen from the second quarter.

AMD is reportedly going to produce the GPU codenamed Greenland not only at its regular partner Global Foundries, but also at Samsung. It is an important step for Samsung, reports the Korean ETNews, because until now the chip branch of the group mainly produced mobile chips. The rumor does not come completely out of the blue: recently AMD and Global Foundries announced that they had developed a first test chip on the 14nm low power plus process.

Samsung and Global Foundries are working closely together on this process. At the time, it was not known whether it was an APU or GPU, but in any case Samsung would produce both chips. As far as the apu is concerned, it would be the Zen chips that should appear in late 2016 or early 2017.

Wccftech lists the rumors about AMD’s new GPU generation. Greenland would become part of a series known internally as the ‘Arctic Islands’ family of Radeon 400 models. The video chips will be built around a new Graphic Core Next architecture and will use the second generation of high bandwidth memory. The switch from a 28nm process to a 14lpp finfet process should provide considerably more economical GPUs.