Samsung representative talks about the entry of the company in the manufacture of chips to develop ASIC, which is the entry of a large company in this field, officially.
Without making much noise, Samsung has become the most important manufacturer of SoC for smartphones and tablets, even passing in many respects to Qualcomm, who had achieved a great hegemony. The company is so strong in the chip market, that it wants to take a new leap and wants to assume an important role in the cryptocurrency market, like the one that AMD and NVIDIA currently have, in the mining of cryptocurrencies through GPUs. Right now it does not seem like an option for Samsung to manufacture its own GPUs, but it is not ruled out for the mining market.
A Samsung spokesperson spoke with TechCrunch and confirmed that Samsung has indeed entered the processor manufacturing market to develop ASICs. "In the first quarter, earnings are expected to increase with the ramp-up of second-generation 10nm process products for high-end smartphones this year and the growing demand for chips for cryptocurrency mining."
The entry into the manufacture of special silicon for ASICs does not imply direct competition for NVIDIA and AMD, which do not enter this field, but it can be a problem for Bitmain, which is the world's largest manufacturer of ASICs and depends on TSMC , which is who manufactures the processors. The South Korean company wants to see how it fares with ASICs and if this market is profitable for them, AMD and NVIDIA can already soak their beards, because GPU mining is much more profitable than ASIC.
Little is known about these solutions. It is not known if they will be the same as those that can be found on a smartphone or will be different solutions, specially developed for ASICs. It is also not known if they will be sold separately or already in ASIC, as Bitmain does, although the great advantage is the 10nm, which allows a great reduction in energy consumption, improving efficiency. There is no doubt that you want to see what Samsung does in the field of mining and for sure, that will give much to talk about.
