Samsung, accelerating its entry into HBM

According to Korean media reports, South Korea's Samsung Electronics is stepping up its efforts to penetrate deeper into the HBM3 market. Due to its small share of the entire memory chip market, the company has been neglected relative to other high-performance chips. this field.

But the emergence of generative AI such as ChatGPT is pushing the world's top memory chip manufacturers to increase production of HBM chips, which have faster data processing speeds and lower energy consumption than traditional DRAM.

Samsung recently delivered samples of its HBM3 product with 16 GB of memory capacity and lowest energy consumption to customers, industry sources said on Monday.

Currently, 16GB is the maximum memory capacity of existing HBM3 products, and the data processing speed is 6.4GB per second, the fastest in the industry. It also provides samples of 12-layer 24GB HBM3, which is the fourth generation HBM chip and the thinnest of its kind in the industry. Smaller domestic rival SK Hynix launched the same model for the first time in the world in April last year.

Sources claim that Samsung is now ready to mass produce both types of HBM3. In the second half of the year, it will launch advanced models of HBM3 memory with higher performance and capacity.

HBM is a product made by vertically stacking DRAM chips. It is primarily used in graphics processing units (GPUs) that power generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT.

It is understood that Samsung has started shipping HBM3 products to its major customers.

AMD's recently released MI 300 accelerated processing unit embeds Samsung's HBM3 memory. AMD is an American fabless semiconductor company. MI 300 chips are used to power supercomputers. The Aurora supercomputer, jointly developed by Intel Corporation and Argonne National Laboratory, is said to be equipped with Samsung chips, sources said.

HBM is not ranked high in Samsung's rankings. Instead, it focuses on mobile chips and high-performance computing technology designed to improve data processing capabilities and performance of complex calculations.

The HBM market is still in the early stages of growth, accounting for less than 1% of the DRAM market. Industry observers say Samsung's aggressive entry into the field is expected to shake up the HBM market and provide support for the sluggish DRAM market.

According to TrendForce, the HBM market is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 45% or more from this year to 2025, in line with the growth of the artificial intelligence market. The Taiwanese research firm said SK Hynix controls half of the global HBM market, followed by Samsung (40% stake) and Micron Technology (10% stake).

In 2021, Samsung developed HBM-PIM (processing in memory) integrated with AI accelerator. According to Samsung Electronics, it enables AI application generation 3.4 times higher than HBM-powered GPU accelerators. It also introduced CXL DRAM, which has greater data processing power than traditional DRAM, so it can prevent memory bottlenecks in AI supercomputers, or slowdowns in text generation and data movement.

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