Sucks to be Intel this year. All Samsung need to do now is release a non-broken x86-64 chip and Intel are in serious trouble.
Samsung topples Intel as semiconductor top dog, but lead 'literally built on sand'
Gartner beancounters say price rises driven by memory shortages propelled Samsung into the lead based on semiconductor vendor revenue, vaulting past Intel and its CPUs. Gartner research VP Andrew Norwood said: "The largest memory supplier, Samsung Electronics, gained the most market share and took the No. 1 position from Intel …
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Thursday 4th January 2018 17:54 GMT Steve Todd
Re: "All Samsung need to do now" @Pascal
Erm, Samsung HAVE a 10nm process that actually works and yields at an acceptable level (something that Intel have spectacularly failed at, their 10nm process is over 2 years late and still isn't ready for volume production).
As for the other part of the equation, that rather depends on how you look at things. They've been an ARM shop for quite some time (with the Exynos line), which has comprehensively beaten Intel in the mobile category. They can't whip up a competitive x86 design overnight, but they could start fabbing AMD designs for them in fairly short order.
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Friday 5th January 2018 07:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "All Samsung need to do now" @Pascal
What Samsung calls its 10nm process is, like TSMC's 10nm process, comparable to Intel's 14nm process. Samsung and TSMC's 7nm processes are comparable to Intel's 10nm process so when they start shipping 7nm stuff later this year then they will be ahead of Intel. Rumors have it that Intel is having terrible problems with their 10nm process which is why they keep adding another '+' to their 14nm and claiming that tweak is revolutionary...
As for designing their own x86-64, don't make me laugh. Given how poorly their Exynos cores compare to those in Apple's SoC which has more than double the single threaded performance, they couldn't hope to compete with either Intel or AMD - and x64-64 is a far more complicated ISA to design for than the relatively clean ARM64 ISA.
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Friday 5th January 2018 12:53 GMT Pascal Monett
@ Steve Todd
Agreed, they do have one. It is fully booked and not ready for another design at this point. They would be daft to stop what they are currently producing there just to try piss off Intel, not to mention the contractual obligations that almost certainly prevent that.
That's why I said they need to have made another one.
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Thursday 4th January 2018 15:58 GMT Steve Foster
Re: Who are the "others"?
But AMD got out of actually making chips for themselves, didn't they? (IIRC, they mostly get them from Global Foundries [who also don't make the top 10]).
Meanwhile, if 10th place has 2.1% share, and "others" are 40% of the overall market, that suggests there are a lot of bit players (at least 21!).
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Friday 5th January 2018 07:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: TSMC?
They're a foundry, this list is comparing companies that sell their own chips - that's why Qualcomm and Broadcom are on the list even though they don't manufacture the chips they sell, and Western Digital is on the list when they sell SSDs using NAND chips they bought from someone else (which are probably double counted here...)
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Friday 5th January 2018 09:42 GMT NeilPost
Bogus data?
How come ‘Others’ at $175bn is almost the same value as the top 10 on the list added together.
The 10th player is Only $8bn, so the table looks a little bogus IMHO. At best there are 22 ‘niche’ Chip makers doing $8bn each which seems a bit implausible.
Any fact checking done on the story, or are you hiring #advancedcontentwriters from the Daily Mirror these days???
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