Samsung kept its promise by shipping its first 3nm GAA chip to crypto miners, during a celebration event and becoming the world’s first 3nm chipmaker.
The celebration event was held at Hwaseong Campus, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea, and was attended by a number of Samsung officials and South Korean politicians.
These first 3nm GAA chips were not ordered by companies like Qualcomm for mobile chips, but for crypto miners. In the future, Samsung certainly plans to mass produce this new chip for cellphone chip makers.
The advantage of this 3nm GAA chip is that it can bypass the limitations that existed in the previously used FinFET process, especially regarding performance and power efficiency. Samsung claims that with this fabrication process, the chip can save 45% more power and 23% faster performance than the 5nm process.
This improvement is achieved by using a processing called Gate-All-Around transistor architecture (GAA FET) which is an update of the FinFET architecture.
Samsung says this processing will be used for ‘high performance, low power computing’ and for mobile processors to follow. Later the second generation 3nm processing is expected to reduce power consumption by 50%, size up to 35%, and improve performance by 30%.
“On the 25th, Samsung Electronics held a 3nm product shipping ceremony using transistors with GAA (Gate All Around) technology on the V1 line at Hwaseong Campus, Gyeonggi-do. The event was attended by 100 people, including the Minister of Trade, Industry, and Energy CHangyang Lee,” Samsung wrote in a statement.
This 3nm GAA technology is expected to be mass produced for the Exynos 2300. However, there is also a possibility that this process will be used to produce Snapdragon 8 Gen 2.
Meanwhile, Samsung’s biggest competitor in the semiconductor realm, TSMC, is reportedly only going to start mass-producing 3nm chips in the near future. The 3nm chip from TSMC is likely to be first used in Apple’s M2 Pro and M2 Max chips for the MacBook Pro line and various other Apple products.