Samsung is manufacturing IBM’s first, most powerful 7nm data center chip

Samsung’s semiconductor business arm is scoring another win as the company has signed an agreement to manufacture IBM’s latest processor chip for data centers. IBM unveiled its new POWER10 data center chip earlier today as a successor to the IBM POWER9 solution. POWER10 promises up to three times energy efficiency improvements and it will be IBM’s first chip based on 7nm process technology.

The IBM POWER10 boasts new hardware-enabled security capabilities like transparent memory encryption and introduces a breakthrough technology called Memory Inception which can improve cloud capacity and economics for memory-intensive workloads. The chip’s new architecture provides 10x, 15x, and 20x faster AI for FP32, BFloat16, and INT8 calculations per socket compared to the IBM POWER9.

Industry watchers believe that IBM may want to capitalize on Intel’s delay in the production of 7nm chips and the company is looking to make the POWER10 available as soon as possible, Meanwhile, Samsung has been putting its 7nm process technology to good use not only for IBM but a few other prominent clients. Just earlier this summer, Samsung won a limited order to manufacture some of NVIDIA’s 7nm GPUs. Those orders were shared with TSMC but IBM made no mention of the Taiwanese semiconductor company in regards to POWER10. Samsung is seemingly the sole manufacturer of its high-performance data center chipset.