David Kanter (dkanter@realworldtech.com) on 12/21/11 wrote:
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>And as much as Samsung really wants to be a logic provider, I'm not sure they really
>want to be in direct competition with Intel. Remember, most of their money comes
>from DRAM, which requires working with Intel. Also, they might be tempted to use
>internal manufacturing and frankly I don't know how good Samsung's process technology is.

Samsung is part of the "Common Platform Alliance" along with IBM and Global Foundries. Broadly speaking, you've got three "teams" pushing state-of-the-art silicon: Intel, TSMC, and IBM/GF/Samsung.

Intel is ahead (32nm was shipping in early 2010 and 22nm will be shipping early next year), but the other guys are coming along, too.

Samsung is shipping 20-ish nm chips, although not chips with lots of random logic.

TSMC has started shipping 28nm chips.

My read is that the other guys are about one year behind Intel in process technology ... maybe a bit more if the 3D 22nm stuff turns out to be a big deal.

I doubt that Samsung would be in any worse shape than Global Foundries when it comes to building AMD x86 chips. What I don't see is *why* Samsung would want to get into this market. AMD's failings the last few years seem to have have been design screw-ups:
    *) Barcelona shipping initially at 1.9GHz
    *) Bulldozer performance being underwhelming even at clock speed comparable to Intel

I don't see how Samsung could fix this sort of thing.