Samsung's next-gen Mach-2 AI accelerator chip gets development speed up, coming sooner

Samsung is still working on its in-house Mach-1 AI inferencing chip. CEO Kyung Kye-hyun, who is in charge of the chip business, teased a second-gen Mach-2 AI accelerator in a new Instagram post.

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Samsung Electronics CEO Kyung Kye-hyun said: "Client interest in inference-committed Mach-1 is increasing. Some of the clients want to use Mach in large-scale applications with more than 1 trillion parameters, which justifies the faster-than-expected development of Mach-2. We should get down to preparation".

The new Mach-1 AI accelerator was announced at Samsung Electronics' recent shareholder meeting, but few details were released: all we know is that it will be used for AI inferencing and will launch in early 2025. Samsung recently formed a new HBM team focused on increasing productivity and quality to ensure HBM leadership against South Korean rival SK hynix.

Samsung was also recently the first to announce the development of new 12-layer HBM3E memory earlier this year, with production-ready for later this year. SK hynix and Micron also have HBM3E memory on the way, but they're only pumping out 8-layer HBM3E memory for now.

As for Samsung's new Mach-1, it's a new system-on-chip (SoC) that reduces the bottleneck between GPUs and HBM memory chips, while its next-generation model of the inference-committed AI accelerator -- Mach-2 -- is in development. Kyung said on Friday: "We need to accelerate the development of Mach-2, for which clients are showing strong interest".