A report from JPMorgan indicates that AMD will continue to rely on TSMC as its primary foundry. Meanwhile, the chipmaker will outsource certain low-volume products such as Chromebook SKUs to Samsung’s 4nm capacity to improve supply and margins. (lakegenevaadventures) Last month, a rumor from Taiwan had claimed that Team Red may switch to Samsung’s 3nm node for its next-to-next generation Zen 5 processors.
JP Morgan research, on the other hand, claims that all three major PC chipmakers (NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel) will stick to TSMC as their primary foundry partner for the foreseeable future. AMD is going to use the N5 process for its Zen 4 (Raphael, Genoa, Bergamo) lineup, and the N3 process for the Zen 5 offerings. NVIDIA will use TSMC’s 5nm capacity for its upcoming RTX 40 series “Ada Lovelace” graphics cards. Finally, Intel will use the 5nm node for its future Arc graphics cards, and some of the Ponte Vecchio chiplets.
The report also alleges that Intel will go all-in with TSMC’s 3nm process node. Team Blue will supposedly tap into the node to manufacture its GPUs as well as certain CPUs in 2023. So much so that the chipmaker is expected to become TSMC’s second-largest client, next to only Apple, pushing AMD to the third position in the foundry’s book.
TSMC is slated to control 90% of the advanced foundry business with its N5 node in 2022, with Samsung hanging onto the rest. JPMorgan believes that TSMC’s dominance will continue with its N3 (3nm) process, albeit it may drop a bit to somewhere between 80-90%.
Intel’s share in the wafer output pie for 2023 is estimated to be at 20,000 wafers per month and TSMC is expected to cross 40,000 wpm only in 2023 according to reports from Taiwan. The products leveraging the 3nm process nodes won’t come to the market anytime before 2024.
