The talk around the watercooler includes a rumour that AMD may use Samsung to produce at least some of their 14nm chips in the coming year. If true this has been a huge year for Samsung who produce NVIDIA chips as well as recently picking up a contract with Apple to produce some of their A9 SoCs. The rumour still includes GLOBALFOUNDRIES as a source for APUs and GPUs so this would make Samsung a second source for working silicon, which we can hope will alleviate some of AMD's difficulty in maintaining supplies of products. This could also help fund Samsung's development of their 10nm FinFET node which the claim should be in production by the end of 2016. As always, take the rumour for what it is but if you want to learn more about what is being said you can pop over to The Inquirer.
"A report in South Korea's Electronic Times, which cited unknown sources, said that Samsung Electronics will start making new chips for AMD sometime next year."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Toshiba denies NAND exit report with 'no decision made' comment @The Register
- 25 years ago: Sir Tim Berners-Lee builds world's first website @ The Register
- Facepalm time: Windows 10 security patch wipes custom Word autotext @ The Register
- Make Show-Stopping Netflix Socks @ MAKE:Blog
http://www.bloomberg.com/news
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-22/samsung-wins-first-round-in-graphics-patent-case-nvidia
The judge determined there had been a violation of three patents, and a public version of the determination will be released later, according to a release posted by the agency on its website.
Nvidia violating Samsung patents. LOL
I’m no great fan on the
I’m no great fan on the hardware Gimpers at Nvidia, but some of these overly broad patents approved for Samsung/others and including Nvidia should never have been awarded by the USPTO in the first place, especially the awarding of any patent for placing more functionality on a single monolithic processor die, as that is just a natural progression of miniaturization. A lot of technology companies are gaming the USPTO’s system and taking advantage of the inexperienced with the technology sector workers that the USPTO is hiring to do the work. There needs to be a USPTO review of all technology related patents that have been awarded to make sure that some of the more egregious of the technology patent awards should have been issued in the first place.
It is always a risky proposition when any company files a patent claim, as that leads to the patents in question going through a thorough review by the courts, and often times the court reviewed patents are voided under the proper amount of scrutiny. The USPTO needs to have its awarded patents that are overturned by the courts analyzed to rate the USPTO on its performance, with the USPTO having to come forward with any solutions to a poor performance history. Improperly awarded patents, especially in the technology sector, are costing billions in court costs so the USPTO could do with a special review board looking over its shoulder.
Nvidia is just doing what any unhealthy monopoly interest is doing when the interest starts removing functionality from its product offerings like Nvidia has done with the Gimping of its GPU’s in hardware compute resources. This is just the classic monopoly tactic of further segmenting its product portfolio and charging more to put the removed compute/other resources back. The Same goes for Intel with numbers of PCI lanes supported on its chip-sets on its consumer SKUs, etc.
Global Foundries licensed
Global Foundries licensed Samsungs 14 nm process so it should be an easy port if they need a second supplier of or if Global Foundries is still having issues. The progress on process tech seems to be at almost full stop at the moment, so we probably should expect issues. There hasn’t been much attention drawn to the lack of Skylake supplies. Is Intel having process issues or issues with the Skylake design? I checked newegg several times recently and they were still out of stock.
Global Foundries, Samsung,
Global Foundries, Samsung, and IBM have been in a technology sharing foundation/alliance for some years now. So its no surprise that Global Foundries has licensed Samsung’s 14nm process, and that Global Foundries is now in possession of IBM’s chip fabrication business and providing for IBM’s fab needs. IBM licenses a lot of its patents and has been helping both Samsung and Global Foundries with engineering and IP to help assure IBM of a source of multiple potential fab partners, especially in advance of IBM offering its Power/Power8 IP up for Arm Holdings Type licensing of power/power8/Power9 CPU processor designs. Getting the independent chip foundry businesses in a competitive position relative to Intel’s fab process node lead benefits not only IBM, but the entire fab-less CPU/SOC/APU/GPU/other markets that utilize the independent chip foundry market to have their chip fabricated.
Isn’t Samsung’s “10nm” really
Isn’t Samsung’s “10nm” really closer to 16/20nm? I thought that they were not truly shrunk (shrinked) as small as Intel.
Semiwiki did a pretty good
Semiwiki did a pretty good break down of he various processes, and explains how just describing them in nm isnt that helpful anymore.
https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/content/3884-who-will-lead-10nm.html