Intel has disclosed plans to hike its CPU prices by 10-20% starting October, but AMD is not expected to follow suit amid the waning terminal market demand, according to industry sources.
Supply chain players including peripheral IC makers, chips distributors and system brand vendors have questioned what they call Intel's "risky" price-hike strategy that comes at a time when the entire supply chains for notebooks and desktops are striving to curb inventories, the sources said, although the move is meant to motivate brand PC vendors to make more chip purchases in advance.
The sources said AMD will "absolutely" not raise its prices for mainstream CPU and GPU products, and is also expected to have better prices for high-end HPC chips solutions for server and AI applications.
Based on its multi-supplier strategy, AMD reportedly has mulled wafer starts at Samsung Electronics for 6nm notebook and PC processors to lower production costs, but the sources said that chances are slim for Samsung to "volume produce" AMD's mainstream CPU/GPU offerings.
AMD did not comment on remarks by supply chain sources.
AMD sustains close partnerships with Taiwan supply chain partners including TSMC, ASE Technology and major IC test interface solutions providers. Besides adopting advanced manufacturing processes, AMD also uses the CoWoS (chip in wafer on substrate) technology under TSMC's 3D Fabric platform to package its high-end server and datacenter-use HPC chips, and even incorporates 3D chiplet packaging technology to process its gaming PC chips and top-end AI chips, the sources said.
AMD has also relied on ASE Technology's FO-MCM (fan-out multi-chip module) and FO-EB (embedded bridge) solutions to process part of its datacenter chips, as it continues to gain market shares from Intel in the chip segment, the sources noted. They added ASE and its affiliate Siliconware Precision Industries (SPIL) have also shared part of the backend orders for AMD's mainstream PC CPU and GPUs, which are now mostly packaged by China's Tongfu Microelectronics.
AMD also mainly sources high-end IC test sockets and system-level test (SLT) solutions, as well as wafer probe cards and final-test boards and sockets from Taiwan suppliers, the sources said.
Article translated by Willis Ke
