IBM was a semiconductor process development partner with Samsung (just like AMD and Nvidia are) and Samsung wanted to take its foundries up another notch from making chips for smartphones and tablets to making server chips – we think possibly as a pretext to entering the Arm server chip arena, or at least to get some of the action among Ampere Computing, Amazon Web Services, Alibaba, and HiSilicon, which all make Arm server chips.īut none of that matters directly to IBM i shops. This not only hurt IBM, but it also hurt AMD, and luckily for AMD, it was already a partner of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, the largest foundry in the world, thanks to its graphics card business. As IBM revealed in a lawsuit it filed against GlobalFoundries in June 2021, GlobalFoundries could not perfect its 10 nanometer EUV process (just like Intel can’t seem to do either) and tried to move the delayed Power10 chip to a 7 nanometer EUV process, and then in August 2018 it spiked the whole thing and said it was going to focus on 12 nanometer and larger geometries that were already working (and perfected, we might add, with the help of Big Blue). It was a great business right up to the minute it wasn’t, mostly because IBM’s chip volumes were getting smaller and smaller at the same time the cost of creating successively smaller transistors was getting larger and larger.Īnd so, back in 2014, IBM tapped out instead of taping out, and paid GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion to take its Microelectronics chip making business over and to also continue making the 22 nanometer Power8 chips it was already shipping, to perfect the 14 nanometer processes it was already developing for the Power9 chips, and to take over development of 10 nanometer extreme ultraviolet (EUV) chip etching for the Power chips.Īs we all know, it didn’t quite work out that way. Over the decades, Big Blue has invested an enormous sum of money – easily equal to hundreds of billions of dollars in inflation adjusted 2022 dollars – to figure out clever ways to etch transistors on silicon wafers and to package them up into chips that it and other companies used in commercial and consumer products. It’s A Good Thing For IBM That Samsung Makes Chips And Also Runs A Foundry
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