Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang requested Korean chipmaker SK hynix to tug ahead supply of 12-layer HBM4 chips by half a 12 months, in accordance with the corporate’s group chairman Chey Tae-won.
In a keynote speech on the SK AI Summit 2024 on Monday, Chey stated he responded by deferring to CEO Kwak Noh-jung, who in flip promised to strive.
The chips have been initially set for supply within the first half of 2026, however bringing the schedule ahead by six months would see them launched earlier than the top of 2025. That is fairly a tall order.
SK hynix’s 12-layer HBM3E merchandise have been scheduled to be positioned into the provision chain simply this quarter – This autumn 2024. Mass manufacturing of essentially the most superior chip thus far solely started in late September.
16-layer HBM3E samples are anticipated to be obtainable within the first half of 2025, Kwak introduced throughout the summit. The chips are made utilizing Mass Reflow Molded Underfill (MR-MUF) course of, a packaging method that improves thermal administration and was used on the 12-layer chips. There’s extra on them in our sister website, Blocks & Recordsdata.
The CEO described the 16-layer HBM3E chips as having an 18 % enchancment in studying efficiency and 32 % enchancment in inference efficiency over the 12-layer chips of the identical era.
Kwak additionally confirmed his firm was growing LPCAMM2 module for PCs and datacenters, in addition to 1cm primarily based LPDDR5 and LPDDR6.
Huang made a video look on the summit, as did Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and TSMC CEO CC Wei.
As is customary at such occasions, all three praised their corporations’ respective partnerships with SK hynix, whereas Huang additionally reportedly stated SK hynix’s improvement plan was each “tremendous aggressive” and “tremendous vital.”
Nvidia accounts for greater than 80 % of the world’s AI chip consumption.
SK hynix execs dismissed the notion of any AI chip oversupply in its current Q3 2024 earnings name. HBM chip gross sales have been reported up 330 % year-on-year.
SK Group chairman Choi Tae-won predicted in a speech this week that the AI market will probably baloon additional in or round 2027 because of the emergence of the next-generation ChatGPT. ®