Samsung Electronics is reportedly expanding its artificial intelligence (AI) chip design research organization in Silicon Valley to challenge Nvidia, the current leader in the AI semiconductor market, by developing AI chips based on the RISC-V architecture.
According to reports from South Korean media outlet Seoul Economy citing industry sources, Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) recently established the Advanced Processor Lab (APL) in Silicon Valley to focus on AI chip design. The goal is to design their own AI chips based on the open-standard RISC-V architecture.
While Samsung has previously incorporated neural processing units (NPU) in its application processors (AP) for smartphones, it has never designed high-performance computing (HPC) server chips. To compete with other AI semiconductor companies and achieve its goal of becoming the global leader in system semiconductors by 2030, Samsung and the APL team view RISC-V as a breakthrough in differentiated technology.
The IP required for IC design mainly includes the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) from Arm in the UK and the x86 architecture from Intel. However, using these architectures requires significant licensing fees.
In contrast, RISC-V is open-standard, significantly reducing the cost of AI chip design and expanding chip functionality without heavy financial burdens. If Samsung can accelerate the mass production of AI chips based on the RISC-V architecture, it will help compete with existing AI semiconductor companies.
In the past, Samsung has worked internally to incorporate RISC-V into IC design through its internal task force (TF). The formal establishment of the APL organization is to speed up the R&D process.
Additionally, Samsung has established an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) computing lab in the United States. The lab is focused on developing the AI inference chip "Mach-1," which is expected to begin mass production in the second half of 2024, attracting attention as to whether it will disrupt the existing AI semiconductor ecosystem.
