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AMD-Zen-Feature

Before this twelvemonth, we suggested that AMD's decision to move its 7nm GPU product to TSMC could exist a sign of trouble for GF'southward 7nm ramp. Today, AMD is announcing that information technology will movement all of its 7nm product on both CPUs and GPUs to TSMC. Nosotros already knew that TSMC was AMD's foundry of selection for its 7nm Vega GPU, and the visitor had afterwards announced that its 7nm Epyc CPUs (codenamed Rome) would be built in that location too, but this is still a meaning announcement for the company.

AMD'due south Mark Papermaster has published a new blog postal service in which he writes:

AMD's next major milestone is the introduction of our upcoming 7nm product portfolio, including the initial products with our second generation "Zen2" CPU core and our new "Navi" GPU architecture. Nosotros have already taped out multiple 7nm products at TSMC, including our first 7nm GPU planned to launch afterwards this year and our start 7nm server CPU that we program to launch in 2022. Our work with TSMC on their 7nm node has gone very well and we have seen excellent results from early on silicon. To streamline our development and marshal our investments closely with each of our foundry partner'southward investments, today we are announcing we intend to focus the latitude of our 7nm production portfolio on TSMC's industry-leading 7nm procedure. We besides go along to have a broad partnership with GLOBALFOUNDRIES spanning multiple process nodes and technologies. We will leverage the additional investments GLOBALFOUNDRIES' is making in their robust 14nm and 12nm technologies at their New York fab to support the ongoing ramp of our AMD Ryzen, AMD Radeon, and AMD EPYC processors. Nosotros do not wait whatever changes to our production roadmaps equally a result of these changes.

This news is not entirely surprising. When we visited GlobalFoundries in February, the company'southward now-CEO Thomas Caulfield, noted that the foundry was making major investments in its 22FDX and 12FDX nodes and intended to be a market leader in those segments, only that it had settled on a "fast follower" strategy for 7nm. 22FDX and 12FDX are FD-SOI nodes that are attracting attention from the automotive, IoT, RF, and other sectors that don't benefit from the design characters of FinFETs just would still like a node transition that reduced idle power and offered amend overall characteristics. At the same time, yet, GF was clearly moving alee with 7nm and EUV installations — we saw the enormous ASML EUV installation underway and the subfloor of the fab was under active construction to support the tool requirements.

cmos-product-roadmap-overview

GF's roadmap for FDX and FinFETs.

The nigh likely caption for this shift is a difference in business organisation alignments. When AMD spun off GlobalFoundries, the unabridged bespeak was to create a foundry partner that would exist able to compete with TSMC and Intel at the leading edge. GF would do good from new sources of investment and acquirement that weren't tied to AMD and would benefit from additional customers for its factories. 9 years after the spinoff, things simply haven't played out that way. The two companies tangled badly in 2022 – 2022 with poor Llano yields and an inability to ramp Krishna and Wichita that left AMD no choice but to motility those two CPUs to TSMC, where they became Kabini and Temash.

Things didn't improve at 14nm. GlobalFoundries initially planned to skip 20nm birthday in favor of its own version of 14nm, dubbed 14XM. The company was later forced to cancel 14XM and instead licensed 14nm technology from Samsung, becoming a second source foundry on that node. That deal appears to have worked well — Ryzen has certainly proven to be stiff competition for Intel, and the 12nm optimization that led to 2d-generation Ryzen this twelvemonth has too been constructive. But GlobalFoundries appears to have stumbled once more when it comes to its own 7nm. Skipping 10nm was supposed to give information technology a boost in terms of time-to-market, merely at present the company'southward largest publicly appear customer has taken all of its designs elsewhere. GF is still supposed to take a 7nm node ready for high volume manufacturing by the end of the year, but who is going to use information technology?

AMD says this won't bear upon whatsoever of its roadmaps and we're inclined to take the company at its give-and-take. This shift has been hinted at in reports for some time and it's clear the decision wasn't made spur of the moment. The only puzzle at this betoken is when, exactly, we should expect for 7nm Ryzen chips. AMD hasn't notwithstanding announced tapeout of Ryzen ii, which may imply that it plans to lead with Rome on 7nm rather than a consumer launch. The company has used both strategies in the by — the first Opterons launched alee of consumer Athlon 64s, while the original K10 silicon was available every bit Barcelona in servers earlier aircraft as Phenom for consumers. More recently, chips like Ryzen led in consumer before debuting equally part of Epyc. In the mod era, server fries have normally taken longer than consumer counterparts due to the college difficulty of validating high core count processors, but AMD's modular architecture allows them to simplify that step in some regards (designing the interconnects on a 32-core CPU is still no trivial chore, regardless of whether the building blocks are simpler).

AMD, of course, has its own reasons to want to push button ahead aggressively on 7nm. With Intel having slipped on 10nm and now forecasting availability only in Q4 2022, AMD has a chance to steal a march on Intel and be the first x86 visitor to debut a new procedure node. AMD finer led for a time on 180nm when both it and Intel introduced new CPUs inside a month of each other. Intel launched the Pentium III Coppermine in October of 1999 and AMD followed with the Athlon K7.v (Pluto core) in November of the same year. In that example, yet, AMD's yields were far superior to Intel's at higher clock speeds due to the Athlon's reliance on L2 cache that ran at a fraction of CPU clock, while Intel's Coppermine L2 was clocked at full CPU speed. AMD decisively outshipped Intel in total 1GHz CPUs at the fourth dimension, while Intel was eventually forced to recall its Pentium 3 1.13GHz CPU for overheating. Reward at 180nm? AMD.

But never again. While the company didn't skid backside all at once, Intel gradually widened its process node leadership. At first, this wasn't especially problematic — 90nm + Prescott were disastrous for Intel — simply eventually, the gap began to tell. By 2022, Intel was running a full node alee of AMD. While TSMC's 7nm node and Intel's 10nm are expected to be roughly equivalent, AMD still has the chance to launch on 7nm before Intel (and will, of form, take advantage of the fact that people don't necessarily know that there'south a gap in technical capability betwixt 10nm and 7nm at dissimilar foundries).

At present, AMD wants to steal a march on Intel and presumably align with a foundry partner that's got the chapters and manufacturing capability to churn out 7nm cores — and apparently TSMC is a much meliorate fit for those goals than GlobalFoundries, which will remain a major AMD manufacturing partner on 12nm and 14nm.

Now Read: AMD Will Fab Its 7nm CPUs at TSMC, Chip Design Costs Leave 3nm Node in Jeopardy, and AMD Needs More than Capacity Than GlobalFoundries Can Provide