Some time ago, Samsung and AMD announced that they will be building a mobile processor that utilizes AMD RDNA architecture for graphics processing. Samsung is readying its Exynos 2100 SoC and today we get to see its performance results in the first leaked benchmark. The new SoC design has been put through a series of GPU-only benchmarks that stress just the AMD RDNA GPU. Firstly there is Manhattan 3 benchmark where the Exynos SoC scored 181.8 FPS. Secondly, the GPU has scored 138.25 FPS in Aztek Normal and 58 FPS in Aztek High. If we compare those results to the Apple A14 Bionic chip, which scored 146.4 FPS in Manhattan 3, 79.8 FPS in Aztek Normal, and 30.5 FPS in Aztek High, the Exynos design is faster anywhere from 25% to 100%. Of course, given that this is only a leak, all information should be taken with a grain of salt.

PC enthusiast VIK-on pulled off a sophisticated memory mod for the GeForce RTX 2070, doubling its memory amount to 16 GB. In a detailed video presentation (linked below), VIK-on demonstrated how he carefully removed the 8 Gb Micron-made GDDR6 memory chips of his card, with 16 Gb Samsung-made chips he bought off AliExpress for $200. Memory replacement mods are extremely difficult to pull off, as you first de-solder the existing chips using a hot air gun while keeping the contacts on the PCB intact (ensuring no pins short); and solder the replacement BGA memory chips in place.

In addition, a set of "jumpers" on the PCB need to be modified to make it recognize the Samsung memory. The resulting card booted to desktop successfully, with GPU-Z reading its full 16 GB memory size. The card successfully made it through 3DMark TimeSpy, albeit with 30% lower performance than a normal RTX 2070 (6176 points vs. ~9107 points). The card would also crash Furmark. Still, it's mighty impressive that the "TU106" recognizes 16 GB of addressable memory (which means all its memory channels are intact), without the need for any BIOS mods, which is impossible to pull off.Watch the VIK-on video presentation here.

Research and development spending by semiconductor companies worldwide is forecast to grow 4% in 2021 to $71.4 billion after rising 5% in 2020 to a record high of $68.4 billion, according to IC Insights' new 2021 edition of The McClean Report—A Complete Analysis and Forecast of the Integrated Circuit Industry. Total R&D spending by semiconductor companies is expected to rise by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.8% between 2021 and 2025 to $89.3 billion.

When the world was hit by the Covid-19 virus health crisis in 2020, wary semiconductor suppliers kept a lid on R&D spending increases, even though total semiconductor industry revenue grew by a surprising 8% in the year despite the economic fallout from the deadly pandemic. Semiconductor R&D expenditures as a percentage of worldwide industry sales slipped to 14.2% in 2020 compared to 14.6% in 2019, when research and development spending declined 1% and total semiconductor revenue fell 12%. Figure 1 plots semiconductor R&D spending levels and the spending-to-sales ratios over the past two decades and IC Insights' forecast through 2025.

While most laptops and notebooks now offer a 60 Hz refresh rate, Samsung Display announced today that it will mass produce the world's first 90 Hz OLED laptops in the first quarter of this year. Samsung Display Chief Executive Officer Joo Sun Choi said that the company will initially produce very large quantities of 14-inch, 90 Hz OLED displays destined for laptops and notebooks, beginning in March.

"OLED display panels can best satisfy the diverse consumer needs for laptops used in telework, online education, video streaming, and gaming," the company said. Samsung Display said it is helping to introduce a major shift in the market as it collaborates closely with global manufacturers to achieve a new level of excellence for refresh rates in laptops, beginning this year.

Samsung today has officially taken the lid off their latest consumer-oriented SATA SSDs, the 870 EVO. The 870 EVO series from Samsung don't push the maximum storage density ceiling on traditional SATA consumer drives, topping out at a maximum 4 TB, but they do achieve that ceiling whilst making use of Samsung's 128-layer TLC (Triple-Layer-Cell) NAND, which offers increased endurance (and higher theoretical performance than) more widespread QLC-based SSDs (of which Samsung launched the 870 QVO back in July 2020).

Samsung quotes SATA sequential read and write speeds of 560 MB/s and 530 MB/s respectively, with a "variable SLC" cache (which means it decreases in maximum size as the available free drive space decreases). The drives are also quoted at 98K IOPS Random Read, and 88K IOPS Write, and feature the company's Intelligent TurboWrite to maintain the interface's SATA 6 Gbps saturation as long as possible before sustained performance degradation appears. Samsung claims the 870 EVO also delivers a nearly 38% improvement in random read speeds over the previous 860 model, and quotes a (TBW) rating of 2,400 TB (or a 5-year limited warranty, whichever comes first) for its 4 TB model. The 870 EVO is available in either 256 GB, 512 GB, 1 TB, 2 TB, or 4 TB capacities, with the drives' RAM buffer scaling almost accordingly (512 MB DDR3 for the 256/512 Gb models, 1 GB for the 1 TB, 2 GB for the 2 TB drive, and 4 GB for the 4 TB one. Pricing starts at $49,99 for the 256 GB model; 500 GB for $79.99, 1 TB for $139.99; 2 TB for $269.99; and 4 TB for $529.99.

Samsung this year aims to bring OLED panels in laptops closer to mainstream, with the company already announcing it would be scaling its OLED screens to serve the 13,3-16" diagonal-craving population with the best visual quality available. The company is apparently aiming to take this further by investing into under-display webcams, which would prevent machines from shipping with large top bezel designs engineered to accommodate them. It also skirts implementation of other, more exotic solutions such as the one found in the Huawei Matebook X Pro - where the webcam is located in a mechanical pop-up on the keyboard area, and mostly shows viewers the inside of your nostrils.

Samsung says that this under-display design should allow laptop makers to achieve up to 93 percent screen-to-body ratio for an immersive viewing experience. Do keep in mind that such a design was implemented only once in the industry in ZTE's Axon 20 smartphone, which incidentally featured diminished selfie camera and display quality due to it being under-display, which even led to resolution compromises on the area of the display that sits over the camera. The idea in ZTE's phone - and is the same for Samsung here - is that the segment of the OLED display that covers the camera will turn translucent whenever the optics are activated. In the ZTE phone, this resulted in clear quality compromises. We'll see if Samsung fares better. There is currently no time to market on such OLED panels, however.

Samsung Electronics, a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced the Exynos 2100 through its first virtual event, Exynos On 2021. The new mobile processor is the company's first premium 5G-integrated mobile processor built on the most advanced 5-nanometer (nm) extreme ultra-violet (EUV) process node.

The chip's computation and graphic processing performance have been improved and refined to surpass the power user's performance expectations. As Samsung's first 5G-integrated flagship mobile processor, the Exynos 2100 is built on an advanced 5 nm EUV process technology that allows up to 20-percent lower power consumption or 10-percent higher overall performance than the 7 nm predecessor. For further enhancement, the chip offers improved cache memory utilization and a stronger scheduler. The octa-core CPU comes in an improved tri-cluster structure made up of a single powerful Arm Cortex -X1 core that runs at up to 2.9 GHz, three high-performing Cortex-A78 cores and four power-efficient Cortex-A55 cores delivering more than 30-percent enhancement in multi-core performance than the predecessor.

Samsung today at its Exynos 2100 launch event announced that its labor with AMD to integrate the company's RDNA graphics architecture onto Exynos chips has born fruit. It's unclear today on which set of technology this integration is bound to - whether RDNA, RDNA 2, or a combination of both - and actual products will only hit shelves by the end of 2021 and beginning of 2022.

Samsung has announced that the design-in for AMD's RDNA platform into the company's flagship Exynos products for the 2021-2022 timeframe have been successful, and that the first iteration of the design will see the light of day on the upcoming Exynos 2100. The collaboration has reportedly resulted in very good performance values obtained from their IP merger in May 2020. It seems we have a few months to look towards to before we see a Galaxy phone with an RDNA-powered engraving, though.

Semiconductor manufacturing is not an easy feat to achieve. Especially if you are constantly chasing the smaller and smaller node. Intel knows this the best. The company has had a smooth transition from other nodes to the smaller ones until the 10 nm node came up. It has brought Intel years of additional delay and tons of cost improving the yields of a node that was seeming broken. Yesterday the company announced the new Tiger Lake-H processors for laptops that are built using the 10 nm process, however, we are questioning whatever Intel can keep up with the semiconductor industry and deliver the newest nodes on time, and with ease. During an interview with Intel's CEO Bob Swan, we can get a glimpse of Intel's plans for the future of semiconductors at the company.

In the interview, Mr. Swan has spoken about the technical side of Intel and how the company plans to utilize its Fabs. The first question everyone was wondering was about the state of 10 nm. The node is doing well as three Fabs are ramping up capacity every day, and more products are expected to arrive on that node. Mr. Swan has also talked about outsourcing chip production, to which he responded by outlining the advantage Intel has with its Fabs. He said that outsourcing is what is giving us shortages like AMD and NVIDIA experience, and Intel had much less problems. Additionally, Mr. Swan was asked about the feasibility of new node development. To that, he responded that there is a possibility that Intel could license its competitor's node and produce it in their Fabs.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. today introduced Galaxy Chromebook 2, the newest member of the Galaxy Computing family. Since 2011, Samsung has been a leader in the Chromebook market, finding new ways to elevate the Chrome OS experience—and the ultra-premium Galaxy Chromebook represented a path-breaking leap forward. The 2-in-1 Galaxy Chromebook 2 builds on that legacy, offering the leading features from its predecessor at a more accessible price. Boasting the first-ever QLED display on a Chromebook, reliable hardware, and seamless integration into the Galaxy and Google ecosystems, Galaxy Chromebook 2 represents yet another high-performance option for users who love the flexibility of Chrome OS.

"Many kids grew up using Chromebooks in school, and as they enter the workforce, their needs evolve, they're looking for premium, powerful hardware that can elevate that intuitive Google experience," said Shoneel Kolhatkar, General Manager, Head of New Computing, Samsung Electronics America. "We designed the Galaxy Chromebook 2 with these users in mind, taking the popular features from Galaxy Chromebook—incredible visuals, great specs, and gorgeous design and color—and bringing them to a wider base of customers."

Laptop screens are usually considered to be slightly behind the bend compared to TVs or PC monitors when it comes to technology and specs. For one, most laptops still ship with a 1080p panel; if you want a higher-resolution, your next best bet is in looking at a 4K panel, though these do usually max out at 60 Hz. Some 1440p panels should enter the market this year, though, and that might mean more than just a handful of models sporting higher-than-1080p resolution.

Samsung, however, has just announced that they have begun mass production of laptop-oriented OLED screens. These are being mass-produced at the 13.3" to 16" diagonals, and should mean more options from system integrators in delivering an uncompromised image quality on mobility offerings. For now, it seems these OLED panels will only feature 1080p resolution, in a bid to decrease panel costs and thus increase prevalence of OLED in the display market by catering to lower-priced products and price-conscious customers. There is no word on refresh rates at this time, but Samsung says these OLED panels offer up to 10x higher response rates than the typical laptop LCD screen, whilst offering tempting 120% DCI-P3 coverage and minimum pixel brightness of just 0.0005 nits.

Samsung is reportedly readying the 870 EVO line of SATA SSDs, with the drives succeeding the 860 EVO series. While there's no word on the type of NAND flash chips used with these drives, it's very likely that they feature a new generation 3D TLC (3 bits per cell) NAND flash memory, as QLC (4 bits per cell) has been marketed by Samsung under the 870 QVO series, which the company launched back in July 2020. The new-gen 3D TLC NAND could enable the 870 EVO drives to reach capacities as high as 4 TB, and offer slightly higher sequential transfer rates, with WinFuture.de reporting up to 560 MB/s sequential reads, and up to 530 MB/s writes, compared to 550/520 MB/s for the 860 EVO series. Being based on TLC (3 bpc) should also give these drives higher write endurance than the 870 QVO series.

Intel is familiar with chip manufacturing problems since the company started the development of a 10 nm silicon semiconductor node. The latest node is coming years late with many IPs getting held back thanks to the inability of the company to produce it. All of Intel's chip production was historically happening at Intel's facilities, however, given the fact that the demand for 14 nm products is exceeding production capability, the company was forced to turn to external foundries like TSMC to compensate for its lack of capacity. TSMC has a contract with Intel to produce silicon for things like chipsets, which is offloading a lot of capacity for the company. Today, thanks to the exclusive information obtained by Reuters, we have information that a certain New York hedge fund, Third Point LLC, is advising the company about the future of its manufacturing.

The hedge fund is reportedly accounting for about one billion USD worth of assets in Intel, thus making it a huge and one influencing shareholder. The Third Point Chief Executive Daniel Loeb wrote a letter to Intel Chairman Omar Ishrak to take immediate action to boost the company's state as a major provider of processors for PCs and data centers. The company has noted that Intel needs to outsource more of its chip production to satisfy the market needs, so it can stay competitive with the industry. The poor performance of Intel has reflected on the company shares, which have declined about 21% this year. This has awoken the shareholders and now we see that they are demanding more aggressiveness from the company and a plan to outsource more of the chip production to partner foundries like TSMC and Samsung. It remains to be seen how Intel responds and what changes are to take place.

Stock for NVIDIA's latest RTX 30-series graphics cards has been a nightmare for customers across the world, with demand far outstripping supply. This opened up a proverbial can of worms, with scalpers taking to the world wide web, casting their own nets in taking advantage of not only the pandemic (and peoples' refuge in gaming in these uncertain times), but also of said unmet demand. So it has to be nothing short of a Christmas miracle that 500,000 NVIDIA RTX 3080 graphics cards have just been found in an unmarked shipping container in South Korea. The container wasn't registered in the port authority, and was therefore left unopened and unprocessed.

The graphics cards were stored in the container absent of any proper documentation by Samsung, as early as August of this year. Jeff Fisher, vice president of NVIDIA and head of the GeForce division, said in a statement to the company's shareholders that "We've been asking Samsung for this shipment for months. They told us that she had already left the factory, but then they did not present us with any document proving that she had reached her destination". These newfound graphics cards will now be correctly processed and put into the channel.Geeknetic.es made this as a part of the Spanish Fool's Day, which is December 28th. However, considering the current state of the RTX (and AMD RX) market, this is a nice satirical gotcha which I'll keep on TPU. Let's laugh at our misery instead of wallowing in it.

In the upstream semiconductor industry, the major foundries such as TSMC and UMC are reporting fully loaded capacities, while in the downstream, the available production capacity for OSAT is also lacking, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. Given this situation, suppliers of NAND Flash controller ICs such as Phison and Silicon Motion are now unable to meet upside demand from their clients. Not only have many controller IC suppliers temporarily stopped offering quotes for new orders, but they are also even considering raising prices soon because the negotiations between NAND Flash suppliers and module houses over 1Q21 contracts are now at the critical juncture. The potential increases in prices of controller ICs from outsourced suppliers (IC design houses) are currently estimated to be the range of 15-20%.

With regards to the demand side, demand has risen significantly for eMMC solutions with medium- and low-density specifications (i.e., 64 GB and lower), for which NAND Flash suppliers have mostly stopped updating the NAND Flash process technology, while maintaining support with the legacy 2D NAND or the 64L 3D NAND process. This is on account of strong sales for Chromebook devices and TVs. As older processes gradually account for a lowering portion of bit output proportions from NAND Flash suppliers, these companies are exhibiting a lowered willingness to directly supply such eMMC products to clients. As a result, clients now need to turn to memory module houses, which are able to source NAND Flash components and controllers, to procure eMMC products in substantial quantities.

NVIDIA has launched its GeForce RTX 3000 series of graphics cards based on the Ampere architecture three months ago. However, we are already getting information about the next-generation that the company plans to introduce. In the past, the rumors made us believe that the architecture coming after Ampere is allegedly being called Hopper. Hopper architecture is supposed to bring multi-chip packaging technology and be introduced after Ampere. However, thanks to @kopite7kimi on Twitter, a reliable source of information, we have data that NVIDIA is reportedly working on a monolithic GPU architecture that the company internally refers to as "ADxxx" for its codenames.

The new monolithically-designed Lovelace architecture is going make a debut on the 5 nm semiconductor manufacturing process, a whole year earlier than Hopper. It is unknown which foundry will manufacture the GPUs, however, both of NVIDIA's partners, TSMC and Samsung, are capable of manufacturing it. The Hopper is expected to arrive sometime in 2023-2024 and utilize the MCM technology, while the Lovelace architecture will appear in 2021-2022. We are not sure if the Hopper architecture will be exclusive to data centers or extend to the gaming segment as well. The Ada Lovelace architecture is supposedly going to be a gaming GPU family. Ada Lovelace, a British mathematician, has appeared on NVIDIA's 2018 GTC t-shirt known as "Company of Heroes", so NVIDIA may have already been using the ADxxx codenames internally for a long time now.

It seems NVIDIA and Samsung's partnership in bringing to life the green company's semiconductor designs isn't about to end anytime soon. Semiconductor analysts and insiders have said that NVIDIA and Samsung etched a new manufacturing deal on December 17th that still relates to the company's in-high-demand RTX-30 series graphics cards, which should see Samsung increase output - particularly at its Hwaseong plant - to sate the seemingly unquenchable demand from consumers and scalpers alike. The deal, which is roughly valued at "hundreds of billions won" will see Samsung double down on its 8 nm output for NVIDIA's latest gaming chips. This seems to put to rest speculation on an RTX 30-series redesign for TSMC's allegedly better 7 nm process - and according to the industry insiders, NVIDIA looked to Samsung specifically because of the need for "quick delivery of the chips".

This instills new life into Samsung's contract-based foundry business; according to market researcher TrendForce, Samsung's foundry business is expected to post a record $14.05 billion in sales this year, up 17.9% from 2019, as the company expands its client base not only through this and the previous NVIDIA deal, to Qualcomm Technologies Inc., Google, IBM, Cisco and China's Baidu. Samsung is accelerating its investment into EUV lithography in sub-7 nm processes so as to poach more customers and market share from industry behemoth and poster boy TSMC, spending 10 trillion won ($8.6 billion) to both improve technology and increase output on its foundries.

The DRAM market exhibits a healthier and more balanced supply/demand relationship compared with the NAND Flash market because of its oligopolistic structure, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. The percentage distribution of DRAM supply bits by application currently shows that PC DRAM accounts for 13%, server DRAM 34%, mobile DRAM 40%, graphics DRAM 5%, and consumer DRAM (or specialty DRAM) 8%. Looking ahead to 1Q21, the DRAM market by then will have gone through an inventory adjustment period of slightly more than two quarters. Memory buyers will also be more willing to stock up because they want to reduce the risk of future price hikes. Therefore, DRAM prices on the whole will be constrained from falling further. The overall ASP of DRAM products is now forecasted to stay generally flat or slightly up for 1Q21.

Samsung's latest 980 Pro SSD is not unlike the hypercar of solid state storage: ridiculously fast, ludicrously expensive. The company had announced that a 2 TB version would be available sometime near these holidays, and Scan.co.uk has just listed one such 2 TB part. If you want one of the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs money can buy, and one of the only ones based on TLC (Triple Layer Cell) technology, then you might be in luck.

The reseller is listing the 2 TB version of the 980 Pro for a cool £443 (including tax), which translates to about $590. That's more than double the pricing of some very interesting PCIe 4.0 solutions. Considering the 1 TB version ticks at read speeds up to 7,000 MB/s and write speeds at up to 5,000 MB/s with an endurance of 600 TBW, expect the 2 TB version to be even faster and more consistent. Maybe improve your storage subsystem while we are faced with the current gaming hardware shortages? Consider, however, that delivery is estimated for early January 2021.

The current widespread shortages on anything gaming-related (be it gaming consoles or the latest GPUs from both NVIDIA and AMD) are a well-known quantity by now. However, it now seems that NVIDIA's shortages aren't just the result of "outstanding, unprecedented demand", aided by scalping practices, but also from wafer and component shortages. NVIDIA's CFO Colette Kress at Credit Suisse 24th Annual Technology Conference expanded on these issues, saying that "We do have supply constraints and our supply constraints do expand past what we are seeing in terms of wafers and silicon, but yes some constraints are in substrates and components. We continue to work during the quarter on our supply and we believe though that demand will probably exceed supply in Q4 for overall gaming."

There was no further information on exactly which components are experiencing shortages. An educated guess might pin some of these issues on the exotic GDDR6X memory subsystem on high-tier Ampere graphics cards, but there could be other factors at play here. If NVIDIA did underestimate demand for its Ampere graphics cards, though, that will make it that much harder for the company to ramp up orders (and hence production) with Samsung - semiconductor manufacturing works with several months of lead time between orders and their actual fulfillment.

Total NAND Flash revenue reached US$14.5 billion in 3Q20, a 0.3% increase QoQ, while total NAND Flash bit shipment rose by 9% QoQ, but the ASP fell by 9% QoQ, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. The market situation in 3Q20 can be attributed to the rising demand from the consumer electronics end as well as the recovering smartphone demand before the year-end peak sales season. Notably, in the PC market, the rise of distance education contributed to the growing number and scale of Chromebook tenders, but the increase in the demand for Chromebook devices has not led to a significant increase in NAND Flash consumption because storage capacity is rather limited for this kind of notebook computer. Moreover, clients in the server and data center segments had aggressively stocked up on components and server barebones during 2Q20 due to worries about the impact of the pandemic on the supply chain. Hence, their inventories reached a fairly high level by 3Q20. Clients are now under pressure to control and reduce their inventories during this second half of the year. With them scaling back procurement, the overall NAND Flash demand has also weakened, leading to a downward turn in the contract prices of most NAND Flash products.

Chinese IC designers have been left without reliable silicon manufacturers for some time now, as the US administration has imposed a ban on all Chinese manufacturers. That resulted in them having to gain the approval of the US administration to use any US-made technology for the production of Chinese goods. In light of that situation, Chinese clients have begun searching for a new place to manufacture their silicon. According to the report from DigiTimes, their sources indicate that Chinese clients are supposedly having an increased interest in Samsung's silicon manufacturing. The company has seen a surge in chip orders for its 14 nm node, with a report saying that Chinese customers are looking at even larger nodes as well.

This is quite an interesting situation and we have to wait and see how much of Samsung's total silicon manufacturing revenue will the Chinese clients contribute. That specific information should come in any of the next earnings calls if the company chooses to disclose it.

The Taiwan Economic Daily claims that TSMC has achieved a major internal breakthrough for the eventual rollout of 2 nm fabrication process technology. According to the publication, this breakthrough has turned TSMC even more optimistic towards a 2023 rollout of 2 nm risk production - which is all the more impressive considering reports that TSMC will be leaving the FinFet realm for a new multi-bridge channel field effect transistor (MBCFET) architecture - itself based on the Gate-All-Around (GAA) technology. This breakthrough comes one year after TSMC put together an internal team whose aim was to pave the way for 2 nm deployment.

MBCFET expands on the GAAFET architecture by taking the Nanowire field-effect transistor and expanding it so that it becomes a Nanosheet. The main idea is to make the field-effect transistor three-dimensional. This new complementary metal oxide semiconductor transistor can improve circuit control and reduce leakage current. This design philosophy is not exclusive to TSMC - Samsung has plans to deploy a variant of this design on their 3 nm process technology. And as has been the norm, further reductions in chip fabrication scale come at hefty costs - while the development cost for 5 nm has already achieved $476M in cost, Samsung reports that their 3 nm GAA technology will cost in excess of $500M - and 2 nm, naturally, will come in even costlier than that.

Colorful, a Chinese manufacturer of PC components known for its graphics cards, is apparently preparing a special RAM version for AMD's Ryzen 5000 series CPUs. The new arrival is part of the iGame series that Colorful offers. Thanks to SMZDM forums, we have specifications of the upcoming iGame RAM tuned specifically for Ryzen 5000 series processors. Coming in with all white PCB without a heat spreader, the new Colorful iGame memory features Samsung's B-dies designed for maximum speed and performance. The dies are running at 4000 MT/s with some very strict timings. The memory features C14 (14-14-14-35) timings that are supposed to bring the system latency down and improve performance even further. It is estimated that such a configuration will require 1.5 Volts to power it. While the exact name, launch date, and pricing is unknown, we can only wait and see how Colorful plays it out.

Samsung Electronics today announced the global availability of its all-new Smart Monitor, an innovative, do-it-all screen that brings together an unprecedented suite of features for work, learning and entertainment in a single display.

Designed to meet the new needs of today's consumers, who are now working, learning and consuming entertainment at home, Samsung Smart Monitor incorporates powerful mobile and PC connectivity, remote home office and learning features as well as Smart Hub, a comprehensive entertainment hub, similar to Samsung's built-in Smart TV platform.