Samsung Electronics has joined the race to buy at least a slice of Arm Holdings from Japan's SoftBank, if not an all-out acquisition bid like the one from NVIDIA. According to a report by The Korea Times, As of now, the Korean semiconductor giant, which is also an Arm licensee like NVIDIA, is eying a tiny 3-5 percent take in Arm Holdings. A top industry official on condition of anonymity told the Korean paper, that Arm is likely to be acquired by a consortium of multiple companies from the semiconductor industry, given the complex shareholding pattern of Arm Holdings.

It is hence likely that NVIDIA's rival isn't directly Samsung, but rather an amorphous consortium that includes it. At the outset, Samsung's stake purchase could raise the valuation of Arm, making it that much more difficult for NVIDIA. The same official also comments on the uphill battle NVIDIA faces in its Arm bid, and doubted the company's financial prowess to pull something like this off. "NVIDIA won't become the sole suitor for Arm as the company needs to win approvals from fair trade authorities in countries that are doing business with the British company. I think it will be difficult for NVIDIA to gain approval from any of those authorities," he said.

Samsung Electronics reported today KRW 52.97 trillion in consolidated revenue and KRW 8.15 trillion in operating profit for the second quarter ended June 30, 2020. Even as the spread of COVID-19 caused closures and slowdowns at stores and production sites around the world, the Company responded to challenges through its extensive global supply chain, while minimizing the impact of the pandemic by strengthening online sales channels and optimizing costs.

Quarterly operating profit rose 26 percent from the previous quarter and 23 percent from a year earlier, thanks to firm demand for memory chips and appliances, as well as a one-off gain at its Display Panel Business. A partial recovery in global demand since May also helped offset some COVID-19 effects, resulting in higher earnings than initially expected. Revenue in the quarter fell 4 percent from the previous quarter and 6 percent from a year earlier due to reduced sales of smartphones and other devices.

Intel is expected to reveal technical details of its upcoming Xe graphics architecture on August 13, according to a tweet by Intel Graphics that has since been deleted. Tom's Hardware believes the reveal is still on the cards. "You've waited. You've wondered. We'll deliver. In 20 days, expect more details on Xe graphics," the tweet read. Senior Fellow and Director of Graphics Architecture at Intel, David Blythe is expected to present a technical brief on the Xe graphics architecture at a Hot Chips 2020 virtual event on August 17.

These technical reveals are closely timed with the launch of "Tiger Lake," Intel's first commercial debut of Xe as an iGPU solution the chipmaker refers to as "Gen12" for consistency with older generations of integrated graphics. Xe is far from designed for just iGPU or small dGPUs, with the architecture being scalable all the way up to large scalar compute processors the size of beer mug coasters. Even as an iGPU, Xe is formidable, as it was recently shown playing AAA games by itself. Recent commentary from Intel at its Q2 2020 financial results provided strong hints of Xe dGPUs being de-coupled from Intel's foundry woes, and possibly headed for third-party foundries such as Samsung or TSMC.

Today we are in for an interesting rumor. According to industry sources of Coreteks, Samsung is rumored to be preparing investment in GlobalFoundries manufacturing facilities. In the latest ave of Asian foundries getting away from China and getting close to EU and US soils, Samsung is the latest one to join the list. First, let's explain the situation. The Trump administration has been pushing TSMC to drop all orders from Huawei, and TSMC did it. That way, Huawei Technologies has lost a major chip supplier which enabled the company a competitive edge. Now, the company must turn to Chinese manufacturers and it can't use any US-made product.

Given that GlobalFoundries is a company headquartered in the US (Santa Clara, California), the company is an American corporation, which has fabs in the US, as well as in Europe. It is truly a global foundry system. Samsung, a Korean semiconductor manufacturer, has been rumored to invest in GlobalFoundries Dresden fab, located in Germany. The company will help GlobalFoundries expand its power supply capacity from 63 MegaWatts to 100 MegaWatts. The proposed expansion of GlobalFoundries Dresden fab would be funded exclusively by Samsung. So why is Samsung doing this? The answer to this question is pretty simple - to get closer to western markets. Even if GlobalFoundries has foundries all over the world, it is a US company at its core. So Samsung hopes that from this investment, it can get closer to US soil and gain some new customers in the future. After all, Samsung plans to become the world's biggest semiconductor manufacturer by 2030, the position currently held by its rival TSMC. Below you can check out the expansion plan illustrated by Coreteks:

Semiconductor manufacturing is a difficult process. Often when a new node is being developed, there are new materials introduced that may cause some yield issues. Or perhaps with 7 nm and below nodes, they are quite difficult to manufacture due to their size, as the transistor can get damaged by the smallest impurity in silicon. So manufacturers have to be extra careful and must spend more time on the development of new nodes. According to industry sources over at DigiTimes, we have information that Samsung is struggling with its 5 nm EUV node.

This unfortunate news comes after the industry sources of DigiTimes reported that Qualcomm's next-generation 5G chipsets could be affected if Samsung doesn't improve its yields. While there are no specific pieces of information on what is the main cause of bad yields, there could be a plethora of reasons. From anything related to manufacturing equipment to silicon impurities. We don't know yet. We hope that Samsung can sort out these issues in time, so Qualcomm wouldn't need to reserve its orders at rival foundries and port the design to a new process.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, called TSMC shorty, has just become the world's biggest semiconductor company. The news broke after TSMC's stock reached a peak heights of $66.40 price per share, and market capitalization of 313 billion US dollars. That means that the Taiwanese company officially passed Intel, NVIDIA, and Samsung in terms of market capitalization, which is no small feat. And the news isn't that surprising. TSMC has been rather busy with orders from customers, just waiting for new spots so they can grab a piece of its production pipeline.

TrendForce, a market intelligence provider, estimates that TSMC has an amazing 51.9% of global semiconductor foundry share alone. That is no small feat but TSMC worked hard over the years to make it happen. With constant investments into R&D, TSMC has managed to make itself not only competitive with other foundries, but rather an industry leader. With 5 nm already going in high-volume manufacturing (HVM) in Q4 of this year, the company is demonstrating that it is the market leader with the latest node developments. Smaller nodes like 3 nm are already in development and TSMC doesn't plan to stop.

A performance review of the Intel Core i5-L16G7 "Lakefield" Hybrid processor (powering a Samsung Galaxy S notebook) was recently published by Golem.de, which provides an in-depth look at Intel's ambitious new processor design that sets in motion the two new philosophies Intel will build its future processors on - packaging modularity provided by innovative new chip packaging technologies such as Foveros; and Hybrid processing, where there are two sets of CPU cores with vastly different microarchitectures and significantly different performance/Watt curves that let the processor respond to different kinds of workloads while keeping power-draw low. This concept was commercially proliferated first by Arm, with its big.LITTLE topology that took to the market around 2013. The "Lakefield" i5-L16G7 combines a high-performance "Sunny Cove" CPU core with four smaller "Tremont" cores, and Gen11 iGPU.

The Golem.de report reveals that Windows 10 thread scheduler is aware of the hybrid multi-core topology of "Lakefield," and that it is able to classify workloads at a very advanced level so the right kind of core is in use at any given time. The "Sunny Cove" core is called upon when interactive vast serial processing loads are in demand. This could even be something like launching applications, new tabs in a multi-process web-browser, or less-parallelized media encoding. The four "Tremont" cores keep the machine "cruising," handling much of the operational workload of an application, and is also better tuned to cope with highly parallelized workloads. This is similar to a hybrid automobile, where the combustion engine provides tractive effort from 0 kph, while the electric motor sustains a cruising speed.

Researchers at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) have unveiled the discovery of a new material, called amorphous boron nitride (a-BN), in collaboration with Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) and the University of Cambridge. Published in the journal Nature, the study has the potential to accelerate the advent of the next generation of semiconductors.

Recently, SAIT has been working on the research and development of two-dimensional (2D) materials - crystalline materials with a single layer of atoms. Specifically, the institute has been working on the research and development of graphene, and has achieved groundbreaking research outcomes in this area such as the development of a new graphene transistor as well as a novel method of producing large-area, single-crystal wafer-scale graphene. In addition to researching and developing graphene, SAIT has been working to accelerate the material's commercialization.

NVIDIA's upcoming GeForce "Ampere" family of GPUs will be built almost entirely on Samsung's 8 nanometer silicon fabrication process that's derived from its 10 nm node; rather than TSMC's 7 nm process, according to kopite7kimi, a source with a high hit-rate with NVIDIA rumors in the past. The 8LPP silicon fabrication node by Samsung is an extension of the company's 10LPP (10 nm) node. Both have the same fin pitch, but reductions are made in the areas of gate pitch (down by 6%) resulting in a transistor density of over 61 million/mm². Apparently NVIDIA's entire high-end product stack, including the GA102 silicon that powers at least three high-end consumer SKUs, are expected to be based on Samsung 8LPP.

Samsung Electronics today introduced its second-generation quad-level cell (QLC) flash drive, the 870 QVO SATA SSD, that is setting a new standard for high-capacity consumer storage. Featuring an industry-leading capacity of up to eight terabytes (TB), the new SSD delivers an uncompromising mix of speed, storage capacity and reliability for mainstream and professional PC users.

In the past, consumers have had to choose between SSDs - which provide superior performance - and HDDs, which traditionally offer greater capacity. Samsung's 870 QVO SSD, however, is able to reliably offer the best of both worlds, making it an optimal choice for mainstream PC users who prioritize performance and value, as well as for professional users who require high levels of capacity.

Samsung's upcoming flagship client-segment M.2 NVMe SSD, the 980 PRO, has cleared Korean regulators. The drive comes in three capacity variants, led by a 1 TB model (model: MZ-V8P1T0), a 500 GB model (MZ-V8P500), and a 250 GB model (MZ-V8P250). The maximum capacity being rather low at 1 TB suggests that Samsung could stick with MLC (2 bits per cell) NAND flash for the 980 PRO, coupled with an in-house controller that takes advantage of PCI-Express 4.0 x4 host interface to offer sequential transfer rates of up to 6,500 MB/s reads, with up to 5,000 MB/s writes and high random access throughput on account of the MLC NAND flash setup. For higher capacities from Samsung, one should look out for successors of the 970 EVO Plus, which could use 3D TLC NAND flash combined with a similar controller to the 980 PRO, although there's no word on when that drive would launch. The 980 PRO is expected to launch before October.

JOLED, a Japanese Display, Sony and Panasonic group, has recently filed patent infringement lawsuits against Samsung. The fillings against Samsung Electronics, Samsung Display, and Samsung Electronics' U.S. subsidiary, were filed with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas on June 22. There's a concurrent filling against Samsung's German subsidiary running through the District Court of Mannheim in Germany as well. JOLED claims Samsung has been infringing on JOLED's intelectual property on OLED technology (on which the company holds around 4,000 patents) particularly in Samsung Galaxy handsets that have been sold in the US.

We covered JOLED's entrance in to the OLED market back in December 2018. At the time, the company was entering the small-display market with 21.6" offerings. Meanwhile, the company received a 20 billion yen (around $187 million) cash injection from CSOT, a Chinese display company owned by TCL Corporation. This allowed to company to scale its OLED manufacturing for large display panels; the company announced mass production of TV-bound OLED panels on June 19th.

Apple on Monday formalized the beginning of its departure from Intel x86 machine architecture for its Mac computers. Apple makes up to 4 percent of Intel's annual CPU sales, according to a MarketWatch report. Apple is now scaling up its own A-series SoCs that use Arm CPU cores, up to performance levels relevant to Macs, and has implemented support for not just new and upcoming software ported to the new Arm machine architecture, but also software over form the iOS and iPadOS ecosystems on Mac, starting with its MacOS "Big Sur" operating system. We reached out to Intel for some of its first comments on the development.

In a comment to TechPowerUp, an Intel spokesperson said "Apple is a customer across several areas of our business, and we will continue to support them. Intel remains focused on delivering the most advanced PC experiences and a wide range of technology choices that redefine computing. We believe Intel-powered PCs—like those based on our forthcoming Tiger Lake mobile platform—provide global customers the best experience in the areas they value most, as well as the most open platform for developers, both today and into the future."

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced the launch of 'Samsung Advanced Foundry Ecosystem (SAFE ) Cloud Design Platform (CDP)' for fabless customers, in collaboration with Rescale, a leader in high performance computing (HPC) applications in the cloud. The key highlight feature of Samsung foundry's first SAFE Cloud Design Platform is that it provides a virtual environment to design chips in the cloud. By accessing this platform through the cloud, customers can immediately start designing at anytime and anywhere.

To maximize customers' design convenience, SAFE CDP supports a very secure design condition that has verified with cloud companies. In addition, customers can utilize various Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools offered by multiple vendors such as Ansys, Cadence, Mentor, a Siemens business and Synopsys. Gaonchips, one of Samsung Foundry's Design Solution Partners, has already tested the SAFE CDP on its 14 nm automotive project using Cadence's Innovus Implementation System and has successfully reduced its design run-time by 30 percent compared to current on-premise execution.

Samsung, the global leader in gaming monitors², pushes the boundaries of display technology to deliver a radically different gaming experience. Unveiled this year at CES, Odyssey gaming monitors combine the deepest, most immersive curved displays with next-generation performance gaming performance. The Odyssey G9 and G7 are available for pre-order today and on sale July 13, on Samsung.com and select online retailers.

"As the global leader in the gaming monitor market, Samsung understands that gamers want display innovations that reimagine the gaming experience with high-performance features for even the most demanding game titles," said Mark Quiroz, Vice President, Product Marketing, Samsung Electronics America Display Division. "With Odyssey, we're going beyond the expectations of what a gaming monitor should be and bringing a fully redesigned, deeply immersive experience built for the future of gaming."

The Samsung 980 Pro SSD was first revealed at CES 2020, making it Samsungs first consumer PCIe 4.0 SSD. Hardware leaker Ice Universe is claiming that Samsung will release the SSD within the next two months, which puts the latest date for a release in late August if the leak is to be believed. The Samsung 980 Pro should destroy the competition if Samsung's claims are true with advertised maximum sequential reads of 6.5GB/s, and sequential writes of 5GB/s. This is a large jump over Samsung's 970 Pro PCIe 3.0 SSD with advertised speeds of 3.5GB/s and 2.7GB/s, these numbers also offer a significant bump over its fellow PCIe 4.0 competitors such as the Corsair MP600 with advertised speeds 5GB/s and 4.3GB/s.

Samsung is introducing a slew of new features for its recent QLED TV sets to create "more immersive and responsive gaming sessions". Samsung is bringing adaptive sync and HDMI 2.1 to its latest QLED sets which will bring significant gaming improvements when paired with a high-end PC or next-generation console. HDMI 2.1 enables 4K 120Hz support with next-generation graphics cards and consoles, along with FreeSync Premium to benefit existing systems with stuttering and tearing reductions. Samsung is also advertising low input lag of 9.8 ms, automatic game mode with motion blur minimization, Dynamic Black EQ to improve object clarity in dark scenes, and Multi-View PiP capability.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced that it has received UL's Zero Waste to Landfill validation of Gold level and above for all of its global semiconductor operation sites. This signifies that Samsung's semiconductor sites in South Korea, US and China meet the requirement of more than 95-percent waste diversion through methods that do not involve thermal processing. In particular, the Samsung DSR building in Hwaseong, Korea, home to most of its local semiconductor R&D staff, is validated for Zero Waste to Landfill at the Platinum level for reaching 100-percent waste diversion.

"The Zero Waste to Landfill Gold validation is testament to the care and effort by our employees around the world to protect the environment," said Chanhoon Park, executive vice president of global infrastructure technology at Samsung Electronics. "Eco-friendly operations are now a must for any business and we will continue to ensure sustainable growth that is mindful of the environment that we live and operate in."

For users that want to fully migrate their HDD storage towards a speedier SSD-option, Samsung's QVO series has usually been one of the more interesting prospects. Built solely with the intention of offering some of the best performance/$ metrics in the SSD storage space, the QVO series keeps Samsung's quality track record when it comes to NAND production but aims to reduce pricing as much as possible.

Amazon has now listed an 8 TB, consumer-available Samsung 870 QVO SSD. This SSD won't win any speed contests: it's built on the 2.5" form-factor and features a SATA III interface, but then again, this isn't meant to be used as users' fastest storage solution - it's meant to replace high-capacity HDDs while offering a notable performance improvement. It's very likely the QVO 870 is using Samsung's QLC (quad level cell) 3D V-NAND tech - which is still fine for most use-cases where you'll be mostly reading from the disc (and honestly, it's likely that most users would never even see performance degradation over the lifetime of the SSD, should they have a typical usage scenario). The 8 TB Samsung 870 QVO is currently listed on Amazon for a relatively steep $899.99 - which still amounts to some 11 cents per GB, so not a bad deal at all. Remember that pricing is currently slightly on the high side following the COVID-19 pandemic, though.

RosetEra user 12Danny123 has discovered a new Samsung page dedicated to Samsung Access for TV, a subscription rental service that includes reference to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Microsoft and Samsung have existing partnerships in the game streaming arena so its not much of a stretch to see them bring Xbox Project xCloud and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to Samsung's TVs sometime in the future.

The page includes a snippet stating "with Samsung Access, you get your choice of a streaming or gaming service (up to a $120 value), included at no additional cost. Choose from Showtime, Sling TV, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, YouTube Music Premium, YouTube Premium, or YouTube TV." This isn't the first time a company has included game streaming directly from their TV, Sony previously enabled Playstation Now support on select Bravia televisions however this was later discontinued. Take all this information with a grain of salt as this may be just a code for use on Xbox or PC and not an indication of future support.

When AMD scored a double hit by winning the Xbox and the PlayStation console projects the number of GPUs the company shipped from 2013 on took a jump. As their APU sales increased (partially due to the console wins) their overall sales increased even more. Likewise, as AMD introduced the Zen CPU, associated GPU sales also increased. The net result is since 2013 AMD has shipped over a half-billion GPUs either integrated or discrete.

When compared to Intel (integrated only) or NVIDIA (discrete only) both companies beat AMD in their respective classes, but overall AMD beats them both. Fun with numbers. The cumulative distribution of GPUs by platform is shown in the following chart. Next year AMD will be able to add Samsung smartphones to its list of platforms, and those numbers are going to huge.

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, today announced plans to expand its NAND flash production capacity in Pyeongtaek, Korea, reinforcing the company's ability to meet demands from emerging technologies. Construction, which began this May, will pave the way for mass production of Samsung's cutting-edge V-NAND memory in the second half of 2021.

"The new investment reaffirms our commitment to sustain undisputed leadership in memory technologies, even in uncertain times," said Cheol Choi, executive vice president of Memory Global Sales & Marketing at Samsung Electronics. "We will continue to serve the market with the most optimized solutions available, while contributing to growth of the overall IT industry and the economy in general."

Samsung Electronics today announced the availability of Galaxy Book S with Intel processor, the latest addition to its leading computing device family. To ensure consumers have access to a wide range of computing devices to best fit their lifestyle, Samsung introduces the Galaxy Book S powered by the new dynamic Intel Core processor with Intel Hybrid Technology. Galaxy Book S joins other previously announced premium mobile laptops, designed to offer a seamless and connected experience across devices. Galaxy Book S is built for the next generation of users who are looking for a computing device that provides outstanding productivity, wide-ranging connectivity, enhanced mobility and expansive continuity across devices and operating systems to help them get more done in less time.

"The way we work has shifted and it's important we have computing devices that can adapt to this new working style. Users utilize multiple devices throughout their day to accomplish tasks, and demand that those devices provide them with enough flexibility to remain on the move and available," said Woncheol Chai, SVP and Head of Product Planning Team, Mobile Communications Business, Samsung Electronics. "With our new computing devices like the Galaxy Book S, we are providing users with an exciting opportunity to be productive, efficient and connected."

Samsung Electronics, the global gaming monitor market leader today announced its official partnership with global esports organization, T1 Entertainment & Sports (T1). With this partnership, all teams and players located at the T1 headquarters training facility in Seoul will practice using Samsung's latest curved gaming monitors, the Odyssey G9 and G7. The Odyssey portfolio delivers a powerful combination of high-performance 1000R curvature, QLED picture quality, rapid 1 ms response time and 240Hz refresh rate for the most immersive gaming experience.

"We are proud to partner with T1, the leader in professional esports, helping them in their continued success and global growth as official display partner," said Hyesung Ha, Senior Vice President of Visual Display Business at Samsung Electronics. "Our line-up of Odyssey monitors provides the latest in gaming monitor technology with lightning-fast speed, comfortable curvature and a sleek design, offering professional esports gamers the competitive edge they need to make every split second count."

According to the latest investigations by the DRAMeXchange research division of TrendForce, NAND Flash bit shipment in 1Q20 was relatively on par with 4Q19. The overall ASP of NAND Flash products also climbed during the period. As a result, the global NAND Flash revenue for the quarter went up by 8.3% QoQ to US$13.6 billion.

In 1Q20, demand for enterprise SSDs exceeded supply because cloud service providers' procurement for data centers had been growing progressively since 4Q19. Also, inventories of NAND Flash suppliers mostly returned to normal during the period. Consequently, most NAND Flash products for the major applications experienced a rise in contract prices. As for the impact of COVID-19 during the Lunar New Year, TrendForce's investigations at the time found that the server supply chain managed to make a better recovery than the supply chains for notebook computers and smartphones. The impact of the outbreak on the storage demand from the cloud services sector was thus quite limited. On the other hand, the production of notebooks and smartphones was affected by logistical problems and breakage in the component supply chain. Because of this, notebook and smartphone manufacturers have gradually resumed production since March.