When it comes to the latest CPUs and GPUs, we all know that they need to be made on the most complex and expensive process nodes, in order to pack in billions of transistors into the die. However, not all chips need to be fabricated this way, which is why Intel is only just making the transition to 8 nm for its motherboard chipsets. More importantly, though, it seems that it won’t be the US chip giant that will be making them, but Samsung instead.
That’s according to a news report by The Korean Economic Daily, aka Hankyung (via Tom’s Hardware). Sources within the industry have told the publication that Samsung is “on the verge of securing an order for Intel’s 8 nm chips.” It’s not talking about the company’s CPUs or GPUs, though, but rather its PCHs or platform controller hubs.
Better known as a motherboard chipset, these little dies are responsible for handling the control signals and data flows between the CPU and all the peripheral slots and ports (PCIe sockets, M.2 slots, USB, etc). Intel doesn’t provide a huge amount of information about how and where these chips are made, but in general, they’re not manufactured via cutting-edge process nodes.
Rather than using Intel 7 or TSMC’s N3, PCHs can be made on older nodes (think 22 to 14 nm) because they’re not packed with complex logic processing and dense cache. They don’t even use much in the way of any power, either, as Intel’s Z890 chip gets by on just six watts. But since CPUs are increasingly packing in more and more PCIe lanes, future generations of PCHs do need to be more capable.
Hence why Intel’s next chipsets are expected to be made on an 8 nm process node. And it just so happens that Samsung has a very mature and cheap fabrication system of that type. For example, Nvidia used it to make its RTX 30-series of GPUs and still does for the Nintendo Switch 2 SoC.
The obvious question to ask here is which PCHs Intel plans on being made at Samsung? It’s unlikely to be anything current, and given that the forthcoming Panther Lake and Wildcat Lake mobile processors don’t require a PCH (as that stuff is integrated into the chip itself), it all points to Intel’s next generation of desktop CPUs: Nova Lake.
All the rumours for that processor point to it being huge, with many more PCIe lanes than in Arrow Lake, so a more capable PCH is certainly going to be needed. With Nova Lake expected to appear at some point in 2026, Samsung will obviously need to have production of the PCHs in full swing well before the processors arrive.
The Korean Economic Daily claims that this is already well in hand, so at least that side of the chip package should be sorted, even if the rest isn’t up to speed just yet. Mind you, if you’re an Intel fan right to the very marrow of your bones, with an Intel CPU, GPU, and motherboard, you might be slightly disappointed that one tiny part of the whole caboodle won’t be pure Team Blue.
