South Korea’s president has described the global semiconductor industry as “a field where all-out national warfare is underway” as he announced a $19 billion to diversify the nation’s silicon sector.
More competition is always a good thing
Btw I love The Register’s title; they are usually so fun
Idk, S. Korea’s chaebols actively reduce competition. So be careful who you want to provide that competition…
Good news, the processor industry really needs more competition
“Thanks for all the good memories”
'And all the bad ones"
Glares at hynix
Wonder if they will go the risc-v route.
x86 would be hilarious to invest in now.
Samsung already makes arm
They also use risc-v since 2017
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15228/samsung-to-use-riscv-cores
Okay look y’all. RISC V is a lot of different things. I think when people say RISC V they’re hoping some shit over ARM for SoC. That’s likely to not happen as RISC V just doesn’t have major advantages over ARM to justify the costly swap.
But RISC V as the chip that glues a bunch of controllers is already underway. Chiplet designs that handle IO between the CPU and your various disks are already big things that RISC V dominates in.
So will SK produce RISC V, yes. Will that stop producing ARM SoCs? Absolutely not. RISC V is an open ISA, but an SoC stack requires a lot of things which still need to be licensed, so RISC V isn’t as “open” as some would like it to be, at least in SoC. So it’s not THAT much cheaper than just sticking with ARM.
In China where IP is like “who dis?” RISC V is getting big because it’s open and China likes getting access to that kind of knowledge. But ARM SoC in China still has a lot of inertia, but that steam can run out a lot easier there than say South Korea because of the “who cares about IP?”. So if any of you are pulling your Milky-V out and saying “NUH UH!”, that’s why.
And don’t get me wrong, I love RISC V conceptually. I’ve got a LicheePi here that pulls PDFs beautifully and prints them off on my Brother printer. I love what China is doing with RISC V and yeah, I can see why the US has beef. But most SoCs that come out of South Korea are ARM and there’s very little reason (*it’s not THAT much cheaper) for them to move off of what they already know.
But they are going to be producing the eff out of some RISC V chiplets. If you don’t need everything a SoC requires, RISC V will get the job done.
But beyond Samsung’s modest Exynos SoC operation (which can’t even satisfy demand for its own Galaxy smartphones), South Korea is not home to a notable manufacturer of high-value processors.
So i guess Samsung will get the lion-share of those $19B to expand?
The world’s top two memory chip producers are South Korea’s two largest conglomerates (chaebol), Samsung Electronics and the less well-known SK Hynix. Together, they account for some 70% of the market in Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) and 50% in flash memory (NAND).
So the article says, but i think this money is for CPUs?
i was responding to you asking if Samsung would get the lions share, it’s safe to assume yes.
Samsung used to be amazing. After seeing how they are operating the last 5 years or so, I do not trust them at all. They screwed people on the SSD issues and didn’t properly address it after repeatedly questioned over it. That was last February (2023) and wasn’t the first time they had looked into this issue. You generally don’t go from zero to questioning reliability overnight.
Now most recently, today in fact, it seems that Samsung hasn’t changed at all and they just don’t fucking care anymore. They literally just ignored a company they had plans with and ghosted them. iFixit Doubts Samsung’s Commitment to Accessible Repairs, Ends Partnership.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In remarks presented on Thursday at a government economic review meeting, President Yoon Suk Yeol called for South Korea to “open a new future for the semiconductor industry.”
To make that happen, South Korea has created a $19 billion program to fund construction of chipmaking mega-clusters – especially the electrical and transport infrastructure they need.
The United States and European Union have thrown tens of billions of dollars and euros respectively at IC manufacturers, while South Korea’s chip champs – Samsung Electronics and SK hynix – are indeed monsters of memory as they collectively hold over 70 percent of the market for DRAM and NAND flash.
But beyond Samsung’s modest Exynos SoC operation (which can’t even satisfy demand for its own Galaxy smartphones), South Korea is not home to a notable manufacturer of high-value processors.
Samsung and SK hynix have also made enormous bets on factories to produce more memory – some on the peninsula and others stateside (where they could attract funds from Uncle Sam).
Memory-centric analyst firm TrendForce recently worried out loud about AI-fuelled demand for HBM skewing manufacturing investments away from DRAM, and maybe causing a shortage of the latter in years to come.
The original article contains 680 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
South Korea is planning to Shift gears to catch up in the race.
