Korean media reports pointed out that Samsung Electronics has signed an OEM contract with "Blue Giant" IBM to produce its next-generation Power11 server processor. According to the agreement, Samsung Electronics will use its modified 7-nanometer (7LPP) process to produce Power11 server processors for IBM and promise to meet IBM's needs by improving chip performance and yield. This should be seen as a major progress in Samsung's pursuit of customer diversification strategies.
Samsung's 7LPP processing technology has the biggest feature of the world's first ultraviolet light (EUV) microfilm technology, which allows the wafer to achieve more accurate and detailed circuit patterns. Compared with the previous generation of processes, the 7LPP process has improved performance by 23%, while the power consumption has been reduced by 45%, and the overall efficiency has been significantly enhanced. In addition, in order to further improve the performance of Power11 server processor, Samsung and IBM will cooperate to introduce 2.5D ISC architecture packaging technology. This advanced chip packaging technology is widely used in high-level semiconductors. It can tightly encapsulate multiple small chips into a single chip, further greatly improving data transmission speed, and achieving extremely high chip performance.
report pointed out that IBM currently ranks one of the top five companies in the data center CPU market. Although its revenue scale is not as large as Intel, Ultramicro (AMD) and NVIDIA (NVIDIA), IBM has solidified its customer base by relying on its deep cultivation in niche markets such as enterprise, finance and high-performance computing (HPC). The upcoming Power11 server processor is recognized by IBM as the most prominent server chip in the history of Power platform. It has 99.9999% of data center operation time, and can achieve system maintenance without shutdown and has excellent energy efficiency.
In addition, the Power11 server processor also has a built-in quantum resistance encryption technology certified by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which can effectively protect the system from "harvest-now, decrypt-later" attacks and cyber integrity attacks, ensuring data security. At present, Samsung Electronics Round OEM Industry Department is actively accumulating orders for the OEM through a 7-nanometer maturity process with a yield of 70% to 80% or above, and achieving customer diversification purposes. One of its strategies is to target the problem that the potential shortage of TECHNOLOGY during the stage process, and to make orders by continuously improving the performance of existing mature processes.
In addition to this cooperation with IBM, Samsung Cylinder Foundry recently issued an order to negotiate with Tesla's Japanese Nintendo's Chinese Fabless semiconductor design company to custom-made chips (ASICs), including artificial intelligence (AI) chips. According to Korean semiconductor industry insiders, more and more Chinese crystal-free round-rotor companies are Qingshen Samsung. This is because the yield and performance of China's local crystalline foundry SMIC (SMIC) is still unstable in the process below 7 nanometers. Samsung has successfully attracted these customers by integrating EUV microfilm technology into its mature processes. Especially in terms of Samsung's 4-nanometer, 8-nanometer and 14-nanometer processes that have guaranteed a certain yield, orders from China's crystal-free round plants are growing.