Samsung produces asics for crypto mining

Samsung has confirmed to South Korean and US media that its Foundry division produces cryptocurrency mining asics. This puts it in competition with TSMC, which also supplies these chips.

The South Korean company told TechCrunch: “Samsung’s chip manufacturing division is currently manufacturing chips for mining cryptocurrencies.” This confirmation without further details follows an article by South Korean publication The Bell. The site wrote that Samsung said it has entered into an agreement with a Chinese mining hardware manufacturer, without naming it. Samsung does not want to repeat the detail that it concerns a Chinese party to TechCrunch.

According to information from The Bell, Samsung started mass production of the asics this month. These are used in mining hardware, for example to mine bitcoin. This coin is not suitable for mining with a gpu or cpu. The site writes that the largest Chinese mining hardware supplier, Bitmain, currently sources its chips from Taiwanese TSMC. TSMC wrote in announcing its latest quarterly results that it expects “strong demand for cryptocurrency mining” in 2018 as well.

Samsung has invested heavily in its Foundry chip manufacturing division in recent years in an effort to compete with TSMC. However, Apple is having its last generations of chips made at TSMC and Qualcomm is also reportedly switching to TSMC, so Samsung may try to tap other sources of income such as the production of asics for mining. Samsung recently announced that it has started production of gddr6-vram with a bandwidth of 18Gbit/s, which will eventually end up in high-end video cards. Rambus and Micron said they want to use this kind of memory for other purposes as well, so they partnered up with two other companies. One of the possible applications would be in asics for mining.