Dopo TSMC, Intel potrebbe avvicinarsi a Samsung per la collaborazione

Intel’s revamped IDM 2.0 strategy has seen the company revise its stance in both in-house and outsourced silicon fabrication. While we’re already seeing the fruits of Intel’s collaboration with TSMC (albeit at the relatively slow pace of introduction for Intel’s Arc Alchemist graphics), it seems that Intel is willing to go much farther than just TSMC as a source of chips for its product portfolio.

That’s the backdrop to which Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger recently took a trip to South Korea’s capital of Seoul. According to the Korea Herald, Gelsinger met several key Samsung executives, including Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong, co-CEO and chip business boss Kyung Kye-hyun, and head of Samsung Mobile Roh Tae-moon. More than enough executive grunt to ignite talks of a deepening collaboration between both companies. While the reporting source doesn’t provide any quotes or actionable intel from the meeting, Samsung remains one of the key semiconductor manufacturers alongside Intel itself and TSMC, with a particularly strong portfolio in memory-related technologies.

There’s a phantom in Samsung’s corner that Intel may be looking to take advantage of in all of this, considering Samsung’s perceived competitiveness dip in its latest manufacturing processes. Following the less than stellar results of its 4 nm nodo, which is reported to have hit a difficult yield trajectory, Samsung saw Qualcomm move production of its Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 towards its competitor TSMC. Likewise, reports paint yet another Samsung client, NVIDIA, as opting for TSMC’s manufacturing processes for its next-gen RTX 4000 GPU di serie, likely leaving Samsung starving for clients that can fill its manufacturing capacity. Intel may thus be looking for a fire-sale of sorts on the company’s tech – especially at the company’s usual volumes. It remains to be seen what – se qualcosa – will come out of this.