Intel will work with a third-party company to produce its XE-HPG GPUs . We know that the two giants of this market are Samsung and TSMC. To which company will Intel will look to produce its GPUs? Samsung or TSMC? And why not both?
Who will produce the XPG GPUs of Intel?
The announcement was made by Intel in August 2020 August 2020 during the architecture day: Intel will turn to a third-party manufacturer for the production of its GPUs intended for its XPG graphics cards. This would also be the case for CPUs of its certain supercomputers. No agreement has been signed. Nevertheless, during the SAFE event (Samsung Advanced Foundry Ecosystem), Raja Kodori, the chief architect and director general of the Architecture Division, Graphics and Software of Intel shone by its presence. Which suggests that Intel is quite close to Samsung and the scale can look towards this Korean giant for this project. This event seems to reinforce the rumors that followed the publication of a tweet made by Raja Koduri last year. Raja Koduri posted a photo near the Samsung factory in South Korea.
No final decision of collaboration taken
Bob Swan, the CEO of Intel, for his part, says that no decision in this direction is yet taken. The company will make its decisions at the beginning of 2021. The CEO of Intel nevertheless said that a collaboration track with TSMC is studied. Will Intel therefore work with TSMC or is it a strategy to have competition between TSMC and Samsung play the profile of its business?
Intel is looking for a partner who would be able to maintain sufficient production capacity. Admittedly, TSMC produces GPUs according to the manufacturing standards 7 nanometers . This pleases Intel since Samsung generally builds GPUs at 8 nanometers. But the Taiwanese company is already quite overloaded with its production partnerships with AMD, NVIDIA, Apple and many other companies.
In terms of price, Samsung remains cheaper in GPU manufacturing compared to TSMC. The effectiveness of Samsung products no longer needs to be proven, to name only the Nvidia Ampere GPUs. Which puts Samsung in a pretty good position. It would nevertheless be entirely possible following the words of the CEO of Intel that the latter chooses to work with the two companies. With this in mind, Samsung will be able to produce public ranges requiring large-scale production and TSMC would take care of the production of more specific and efficient chips. Only the future will tell us.
