IBM has announced an agreement with Samsung to manufacture 7nm microprocessors for IBM Power Systems, IBM Z and LinuxONE, high-performance computing systems, and cloud offerings.

The deal combines Samsung's industry-leading semiconductor manufacturing with IBM's high-performance CPU designs to drive unmatched systems performance, including acceleration, memory and I/O bandwidth, encryption and compression speed, as well as system scaling.

The agreement also expands and extends the 15-year strategic process technology R&D partnership between IBM and Samsung, IBM indicated. It positions IBM and Samsung as strategic partners leading the new era of high-performance computing specifically designed for AI.

With Globalfoundries putting its 7nm FinFET process R&D on hold indefinitely, Samsung and TSMC are the only players competing in the 7nm foundry segment.