Samsung Electronics, AMD Partner to Upgrade Semiconductor Manufacturing Infrastructure and Combine Next-Generation Memory Technologies

[Financial News] Samsung Electronics is teaming up with U.S. semiconductor company AMD to improve the performance of next-generation semiconductor manufacturing test infrastructure. The plan is to combine AMD’s latest high-performance processor with Samsung Electronics’ DDR5 memory, next-generation solid-state drives (SSDs) and Compute Express Link (CXL)-based memory solutions to boost computing performance and data processing speeds.
Choi Jang-seok, an executive at Samsung Electronics’ Memory Business Division, said in a newsroom post AMD published alongside the launch of its sixth-generation embedded processor, the “AMD EPYC Embedded 9006 Series SP7,” on the 10th (local time): “As memory and input/output (I/O) technologies continue to advance, manufacturing test environments must keep pace with rising performance and bandwidth requirements. By combining AMD’s latest processor with Samsung Electronics’ DDR5 memory, next-generation SSDs and CXL memory solutions, we can achieve scalable computing performance and memory bandwidth, as well as high-speed I/O capabilities.”
Choi added, “We look forward to working with AMD to bring these capabilities to our manufacturing test infrastructure.”
The collaboration is focused on upgrading semiconductor manufacturing test environments used to validate the performance of next-generation memory and storage devices. As memory and I/O technologies advance, the equipment used to test them also needs to deliver high computing performance and memory bandwidth. The plan is to meet these requirements by pairing AMD’s high-performance processors with Samsung Electronics’ memory solutions.
Products Samsung Electronics has put forward for the collaboration include DDR5 Registered Dual Inline Memory Modules (DDR5 RDIMMs) and Multi-Capacity Rank Dual In-Line Memory Modules (MRDIMMs), which support high-speed data processing, as well as PM1763 SSDs based on the next-generation sixth-generation PCIe interface and CMM-D MD310 based on CXL 3.2. These are memory and storage solutions designed for environments requiring high-performance computing and the transfer of large volumes of data.
AMD’s newly unveiled EPYC Embedded 9006 Series is based on the high-performance “Zen 6” architecture and supports up to 256 cores and 512 threads. Its processing performance is up to 1.8 times that of the previous-generation EPYC 9005 Series, while I/O bandwidth and memory bandwidth have risen to as much as 1.5 times and 2.7 times their previous levels, respectively.
The new processors are aimed at industrial applications requiring high-performance computing and large-scale data processing, including automated test equipment (ATE) for semiconductors, enterprise storage and network security systems. For semiconductor testing equipment in particular, they support managing memory and storage-device tests and running multiple tests in parallel.
AMD plans to begin supplying the 128-core model among the new processors on the 15th, with the remaining models to be shipped sequentially through the end of the year.
[email protected] Lim Su-bin Reporter