// PC GAMER — GAMING
AMD is said to be holding talks with Samsung about making some of its future chips to offset TSMC's constrained supply of cutting-edge wafers
If true, my money would be on low-end laptop APUs or Ryzen IO chiplets.
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AMD and TSMC have enjoyed a very close working relationship ever since the former spun off its chip-making facilities into a separate business in 2008. Its latest Ryzen desktop processors, which comprise two or three chiplets, are made entirely by TSMC, but if one report is to be believed, future CPUs could well be made by the Taiwanese firm's biggest rival: Samsung.
That's according to Nikkei Asia (via Jukan on X), which claims that "AMD…is in talks to build some future CPUs with Samsung from 2028." Although the report says this snippet comes from "one source with knowledge of the situation," the publication explains that the discussions are due to capacity constraints.
As things currently stand, AMD employs various TSMC node options for its products. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D, for example, has two chiplets under its heatspreader: a Core Complex Die (CCD) that's made on N4P and an Input/Output Die (IOD), which is fabricated on the cheaper N6 node.
The former node is heavily used by AMD, with all of its Ryzen AI 300 and 400-series laptop APUs also being fabricated on N4P, as well as its latest Radeon GPUs, but it also uses TSMC's N3 process to make some of its Zen 5c chips.
What we do know for sure is that AMD will be using TSMC's cutting-edge N2 process node for its next generation of Epyc server-grade processors, and while this is no guarantee that all Zen 6 chips will spring from these wafers, Nikkei Asia's remark suggests that this could well be the case.
Given its higher cost and relative newness, TSMC's N2 will probably be more restricted in capacity than N4, for example, and rather than limit its supply of consumer-grade processors to meet the demand of the AI market, it would seem that AMD is exploring the possibility of using the next best thing, i.e. one of Samsung's process nodes.
The question to consider here is just what processors the South Korean chip giant would make. To my mind, there are two main contenders: low-end APUs and the IOD for Zen 6 processors.
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