Arm’s partnership framework with South Korean companies for its AGI CPU is coming into focus. Samsung Electronics is currently centred on supplying memory, and Amkor Technology has already been confirmed as a packaging partner.

Mohamed Awad (모하메드 아와드), a senior vice president at Arm, said at a media Q&A session on March 25 that the partnership with Samsung Electronics is currently focused on memory. He said Arm is reviewing appropriate cooperation for the next-generation version and considers Samsung one of the companies it reviews as a potential partner each generation. Whether cooperation will extend to vertical integration including foundry and packaging has not been decided.

Compared with Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Young-hyun Jun (전영현) mentioning “joint optimisation of logic, memory and packaging” in a presentation that day, there is a gap between Samsung’s expectations and the scope of cooperation Arm has currently confirmed. Samsung is the only company to vertically integrate foundry, memory and packaging, making how far the cooperation layer expands in the next-generation roadmap a key issue going forward.

Amkor Technology has been confirmed as the OSAT (Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test) partner. Awad said Amkor is Arm’s OSAT partner and is working closely with it. Amkor Technology is a Korean-founded semiconductor packaging specialist with global production bases including in Arizona and Vietnam. He said Arm is reviewing multiple companies as ODM partners but has not confirmed any yet.

◆ Limited direct gains for SK Hynix from DDR5 adoption; spread of agentic AI to trigger demand

On memory interfaces, Awad said it supports only DDR5. Asked in a follow-up whether it supports LPDDR5X, he reiterated it is limited to DDR5.

Arm’s AGI CPU supports 6 GB/s of bandwidth per core and was designed on the premise of an environment in which CPU cores per gigawatt increase fourfold, from 30 million to 120 million. If memory bandwidth does not keep pace as CPU cores increase, the bottleneck simply shifts from accelerators to the CPU. This is why the choice of memory interface determines effective performance across the platform.

High-bandwidth memory (HBM), the product SK Hynix can most look forward to, is mainly used in compute-intensive chips such as GPUs and AI accelerators. CPUs are typically paired with DDR-type memory due to latency-optimised characteristics. Some high-performance server CPUs have used HBM, but Arm also chose the standard configuration for general-purpose data-centre CPUs.

For SK Hynix, the implications are different. If the focus is DDR5 rather than HBM, direct short-term benefits are limited. Still, if Arm’s AGI CPU spreads across agentic AI infrastructure, it could be expected to increase DDR5 demand itself. SK Hynix CEO Noh-jung Kwak (곽노정) said that day that advanced memory technology is essential for platforms optimised for AI workloads, leaving open the possibility of incorporating high-bandwidth memory in the next-generation version.

Given Arm’s account that CSS (compute subsystems) came to account for about 20 percent of royalty revenue within four years of its introduction, the scope for the South Korean supply chain to be incorporated as Arm expands its silicon business is likely to become more concrete with each generation.