Global Foundries 7NM cancelled - AMD moves all 7NM production to TSMC

LePhuronn · 28 Aug 2018 at 16:15

KentMan said:
TSMC have Qualcomm, AMD, Apple and Nvidia as customers now, one thing i expect to now see is a lower throughput for AMD on CPU / GPU availability unfortunately, due to the volume of products TSMC is already producing for others.

Money talks. AMD have many more products designed for 7nm compared to Nvidia and Apple, so why would TSMC bump all that production cash in favour of a low-volume customer (Apple) or a non-existent customer (Nvidia)?

If anything we'll see Nvidia get bumped to the back of the 7nm queue as EsaT says above.

EsaT · 28 Aug 2018 at 18:41

LePhuronn said:
Money talks. AMD have many more products designed for 7nm compared to Nvidia and Apple, so why would TSMC bump all that production cash in favour of a low-volume customer (Apple) or a non-existent customer (Nvidia)?

Apple likely has enough volume to be significant customer even though chip die size is small.
At least they're no doubt one of the first users for TSMC:n 7nm node, because small mobile SoC chips don't need best yields or highest clocks.
So they likely have good production contracts.

Broadcomm is another user of TSMC's 7nm node.
Though this Anandtech news mentions other than mobile SoC customers having become more important for TSMC's plans:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12677/tsmc-kicks-off-volume-production-of-7nm-chips

Now any late comer without existing good volume deal on 7nm isn't going to have easy time in getting notable chunk of production capacity.

Server CPUs don't need highest clocks, so AMD might well start first making 7nm server CPUs and then little later Ryzen "3", or what ever they'll call it.
In hindsight looks more and more that this situation didn't come as surprise for AMD...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13122/amd-rome-epyc-cpus-to-be-fabbed-by-tsmc
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12912/amd-zen-2-update-7nm-epyc-in-labs-now-launching-in-2019

smilingcrow · 28 Aug 2018 at 23:55

So who fabs the current mid to high end Nvidia GPUs?

blaineoliver · 29 Aug 2018 at 06:29

Tsmc currently fab nvidia on 16nm and 12nm I believe?

NinjaCool · 29 Aug 2018 at 06:56

Pascal started with TSMC making the cards on their 16nm process but later on Samsung Electronics also started producing Pascal GPUs like the GTX 1030/1050/Ti model using their 14nm process.

jigger · 29 Aug 2018 at 18:55

EsaT said:
Apple likely has enough volume to be significant customer even though chip die size is small.
At least they're no doubt one of the first users for TSMC:n 7nm node, because small mobile SoC chips don't need best yields or highest clocks.
So they likely have good production contracts.

Broadcomm is another user of TSMC's 7nm node.
Though this Anandtech news mentions other than mobile SoC customers having become more important for TSMC's plans:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12677/tsmc-kicks-off-volume-production-of-7nm-chips

Now any late comer without existing good volume deal on 7nm isn't going to have easy time in getting notable chunk of production capacity.

Server CPUs don't need highest clocks, so AMD might well start first making 7nm server CPUs and then little later Ryzen "3", or what ever they'll call it.
In hindsight looks more and more that this situation didn't come as surprise for AMD...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13122/amd-rome-epyc-cpus-to-be-fabbed-by-tsmc
https://www.anandtech.com/show/12912/amd-zen-2-update-7nm-epyc-in-labs-now-launching-in-2019

AMD's CPU numbers alone will be huge.

Mik3 · 29 Aug 2018 at 20:44

Heres a real interesting video discussing the problems and solutions at 7nm, he goes on to say that 7nm might be the last finfet transistors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvbP_TizoNs

humbug · 30 Aug 2018 at 18:30

Mik3 said:
Heres a real interesting video discussing the problems and solutions at 7nm, he goes on to say that 7nm might be the last finfet transistors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvbP_TizoNs

That is interesting, thanks for the link

jigger · 31 Aug 2018 at 15:50

It will be interesting to see what 7nm brings to AMD's parts. That could possibly see the phone market open up.

smilingcrow · 31 Aug 2018 at 23:11

jigger said:
It will be interesting to see what 7nm brings to AMD's parts. That could possibly see the phone market open up.

Do you mean AMD will re-brand a cheap phone as they did with RAM and SSDs?

4K8KW10 · 31 Aug 2018 at 23:25

jigger said:
It will be interesting to see what 7nm brings to AMD's parts. That could possibly see the phone market open up.

Kirin 980 already shows what the 7FF brings...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13298/hisilicon-announces-the-kirin-980-first-a76-g76-on-7nm/2

humbug · 1 Sep 2018 at 15:04

It looks like AMD knew at least as far back as February.

And because of contractual clauses it looks like AMD might have to pay Global Foundries for the privilege of using a foundry other than their none existent 7nm.

4K8KW10 · 1 Sep 2018 at 20:56

humbug said:
It looks like AMD knew at least as far back as February.

And because of contractual clauses it looks like AMD might have to pay Global Foundries for the privilege of using a foundry other than their none existent 7nm.

AMD's well-being (and possibly, existence) depends on staying as further away from GlobalFoundries as possible.

Gerard · 1 Sep 2018 at 23:25

Is global foundries even considered a good fab? I remember back with some of the amd gpu's people saying the GF process had much more leakage than the tsmc process and they would have been better gpu's if they had been done at tsmc rather than gf. Can't recall offhand but i think this was in reference to hawaii and possibly vega.

Panos · 1 Sep 2018 at 23:56

Gerard said:
Is global foundries even considered a good fab? I remember back with some of the amd gpu's people saying the GF process had much more leakage than the tsmc process and they would have been better gpu's if they had been done at tsmc rather than gf. Can't recall offhand but i think this was in reference to hawaii and possibly vega.

TSMC makes exclusively the AMD GPUs for years now.

Gerard · 2 Sep 2018 at 00:03

Panos said:
TSMC makes exclusively the AMD GPUs for years now.

You sure? I remember some waffle on here about one of the processes being very leaky compared to others, maybe it was the other way around.

Panos · 2 Sep 2018 at 00:08

Gerard said:
You sure? I remember some waffle on here about one of the processes being very leaky compared to others, maybe it was the other way around.

Yeah years now. Only CPUs were made by GloFo.
Even the console parts were always TSMC.

Gerard · 2 Sep 2018 at 00:10

Panos said:
Yeah years now. Only CPUs were made by GloFo.
Even the console parts were always TSMC.

Maybe i'm remembering it wrong then, it was definitely about 1 companies process having more leakage than the others, just can't recall how long ago it was.

jigger · 2 Sep 2018 at 13:43

Gerard said:
Maybe i'm remembering it wrong then, it was definitely about 1 companies process having more leakage than the others, just can't recall how long ago it was.

Are you thinking of the original TSMC 20nm?

Orcvader · 2 Sep 2018 at 14:20

Even then, GF was always falling behind. They had to licence Samsung's 14nm just to stay in the game. 7nm looked they they were finally on track to be finally ahead and competitive against everyone else but that's no longer the case.