Intel, the world's largest semiconductor chip maker, is trying to shake up the order of the global memory semiconductor market, which is currently dominated by Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. The U.S. chip maker recently revealed its ambition to replace the functions of DRAM by strengthening the function of memory surrounding DRAM, including CPUs and SSDs, at this year's Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, California.
According to sources in the semiconductor industry on Aug. 31, Intel will feature Embedded DRAM (eDRAM) in its 6th-generation Skylake CPU to improve graphics processing performance, using its 22-nm class process technology. Unlike DRAM, eDRAM is located in the CPU die and handles the system cache. As the product performance and storage capacity of eDRAM improves, so can manufacturers reduce their dependence on DRAM.
Industry analysts believe that this method, which was adopted by Haswell and Broadwell, has become one of Intel's core strategies, going beyond the experimental level. Semiconductor magazines based in Japan and the U.S. said that in the mid to long term, Intel might integrate the existing CPU and DRAM realms in package form based on eDRAM.
A local industry source explained, "Intel integrated eDRAM into a package in Haswell, Broadwell, and Skylake in order to secure the memory bandwidth needed for large core CPUs." The source added, "To conclude, Intel will no longer depend on an improvement in data transmission speeds of DDR Memory, led by Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, so as to expand memory bandwidth."
Intel's decision apparently emulated Apple's strategy, which manufactures chips that show the most stable performance in the mobile processor market. In fact, Apple's iPhone and iPad series are ahead of Android devices in data processing and graphic-operating speeds, even though they are using DRAM with twice or three times inferior capacity and product performance. This is due to the fact that Apple features high-performance SRAM along with a processor. SRAM usually acts like memory in that it temporarily stores data together with a CPU. Intel, on the other hand, uses eDRAM, which is not expensive to manufacture and relatively easy to realize with large storage capacity, instead of SRAM.
Intel's 3D XPoint technology is also highly likely to partly replace the function of DRAM by greatly improving the function of an SSD. If this technology is expanded into the server market and is used in PCs or mobile devices, it could become a standard in the IT industry. The possibility stems from the fact that the U.S. semiconductor company is virtually dominating CPUs for PCs and servers worldwide.
Apparently, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix are not happy about Intel's penetration into the memory market. SK Hynix is worrying about Intel's move and hoping that the market for High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which is a next-gen memory chip, will expand. The Korean chip maker believes that Intel's innovation in memory will ultimately lead to demand for high-performance memory. The company already supplied first-gen HBM to AMD and Nvidia ahead of Samsung. Samsung is also going to manufacture second-gen HBM from next year, and to mass-produce DDR5 by 2018.