Samsung is doing quite well as the company is selling a lot of TV sets and phones, but not that many SoC parts. Despite that, the company has joined forces with GlobalFoundries and they hope to have their first commercial 14nm chips available in 2015.
Kim Ki-nam, president of Samsung’s semiconductor business and head of System LSI business, has told reporters that you can expect a boost in Samsung profits as soon as the company starts supplying chips more chips for Apple devices.
14nm Apple, Qualcomm and AMD in 2015
Samsung is expected to start producing application processor chips for clients such as Apple, Qualcomm and AMD in 14nm and ZDnet claims that this happens before the end of this year.
Kim declined to comment about volume production as in the best case scenario GlobalFoundries Fab 8 in Luther Forest Technology Campus, Saratoga County, New York State, might be ready to produce some 14nm chips in 2015. This would be some a relatively rough timeframe for volume production-When a company just discloses the year for a new manufacturing process, it usually refers to the latter half of said year.
The same report states that Samsung is making some 20nm chips for the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, but we have received conflicting information on Samsung’s involvement in A8 SoC production the matter. Then again, Samsung might win the 14nm contract, as the company should be ready in time for the next generation and that implies that GlobalFoundries’ Fab 8 might end up producing some Apple 14nm chips, let's call them A9 chips, in 2015.
TSMC gets all the A8 20nm profits
TSMC is definitely going to get some healthy competition, as 20nm is currently the best process money can buy outside of house of Intel. Intel is about to start selling first 2-in-1 Ultrabooks based on 14nm Core M silicon and it expects to make millions of 14nm chips by the end of 2015.
TSMC's next step is 16nm FinFET and is expected in 2016 and it will be interesting to see who wins the next chip manufacturing round production TSMC, or GlobalSamsungFoundries.
