AMD on 7nm and New SVP & GM

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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Looks like GlobalFoundries is not getting any of AMD's 7nm pie, which makes sense. All of AMD's current 7nm designs are at TSMC. All of AMD's current gaming console business is at TSMC. AMD has gambled bigly on 7nm, and given everything we are hearing, it looks like it may very well pay off.

Also, Saeid Moshkelani will be taking Jim Anderson's vacated spot.

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After the close of business today there were two AMD announcements of note that I wanted to bring to your attention and provide further detail around:
1. We are manufacturing all our 7nm products at TSMC, and
2. We are promoting Saeid Moshkelani, a 30+ year AMD semiconductor veteran, to SVP & GM Client Compute given the departure of Jim Anderson to Lattice Semiconductor.
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This is definitely good news. Global Foundries didn't exactly distinguish themselves with the last couple runs of AMD chips.
 
It's not in AMD's interest to be tied to one Taiwanese fab, and the newer Ryzen chips on GF's 12nm process have been fine.

Just read that GF has been having 7nm issues. That's too bad.
 
NKD said:
Aren't they required to give some business to Global foundries? I am wondering if they will be making APUs or some ryzen chips at GLO FO.
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They are still making all current EPYC, Radeon, and Ryzen parts there.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
It's not in AMD's interest to be tied to one Taiwanese fab, and the newer Ryzen chips on GF's 12nm process have been fine.

Just read that GF has been having 7nm issues. That's too bad.
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Well the main thing that matters is that AMD prepped for GF potentially fucking up, by creating designs ready for TSMC. The other foundaries pursuing 7nm are Samsung, and Intel with dates of 2020 and 2019, so the best scenario that could have occurred with GF falling flat is this one.
 
Couldn't have been better for AMD. Looks like they really meant it when they said they went all in on 7nm. They don't even have to worry about committing anything to global foundries anymore since they pretty much wont be doing any of these parts. May be the best thing that could have happened to AMD.
 
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NKD said:
Wow wtf! So that basically gives AMD a free pass on an any penalties for not doing business with them I guess. No?
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pretty sure they reworked their deal with GF's a while back so that they weren't locked into only using them. either way given GF licensed their 14 and 12nm production from samsung and samsung is delaying their 7nm it doesn't surprise me that GF is potentially licensing the same 7nm process from samsung as well.
 
Who else uses TSMC?

NVIDIA and Apple. Both are bigger than AMD. I'm not so sure AMD wants to be dependent on TSMC.
 
The GF quotas for AMD were written with 7nm and 5nm in mind. The agreement is being reworked with GF's failure on these process nodes.

Edit: 14nm will be with us for a while so get used to it.
 
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Montu said:
Who else uses TSMC?

NVIDIA and Apple. Both are bigger than AMD. I'm not so sure AMD wants to be dependent on TSMC.
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TSMC has always been the leader though. I am not sure if they screw up much. Well let's look at it that way. They screw up its pretty much even lol.
 
Does this put AMD behind the 8-ball in terms of their upcoming 7nm products? Didn’t they have some of their products planned to be built on the 7nm process at GF? And would they not have to now scramble and somehow get themselves into the manufacturing queue at TSMC for those products? This sounds like it could mean there will be some delays on some or all of AMD’s upcoming products.
 
Montu said:
Who else uses TSMC?

NVIDIA and Apple. Both are bigger than AMD. I'm not so sure AMD wants to be dependent on TSMC.
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I saw a chart on this a couple days ago, but can't find it right now. :(

Interesting video.

 
SickBeast said:
Does this put AMD behind the 8-ball in terms of their upcoming 7nm products? Didn’t they have some of their products planned to be built on the 7nm process at GF? And would they not have to now scramble and somehow get themselves into the manufacturing queue at TSMC for those products? This sounds like it could mean there will be some delays on some or all of AMD’s upcoming products.
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You really haven't been paying attention have you? lol. They had working samples of few months ago. They even demoed 7nm chips. They are already sampling 7nm zen 2 based epyc chips to strategic partners. They will have vega 20 7nm selling to professional users this year, they demoed that too. They are not behind the 8 ball, they are the first on TSMC 7nm. Papermaster even had an article recently where he said they went all in on 7nm and put all their bets on it early in the game.

They even said those chips were being manufactured at TSMC during the demo.

So no, not behind the 8 ball at all.
 
Montu said:
Who else uses TSMC?

NVIDIA and Apple. Both are bigger than AMD. I'm not so sure AMD wants to be dependent on TSMC.
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It's not so much how high a market cap each company has as it is who will buy the most wafers. Assuming AMD moves the majority of their business over to TSMC, I don't imagine Nvidia would be able to compete for that metric. Especially if Zen 2 ends up capturing as much market share as many people expect it to given Intel's perpetual backfire on 10nm. Apple is another story altogether and probably dwarfs AMD and Nvidia combined.
 
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hurleybird said:
It's not size so much how high a market cap each company has as it is who will buy the most wafers. Assuming AMD moves the majority of their business over to TSMC, I don't imagine Nvidia would be able to compete for that metric. Especially if Zen 2 ends up capturing as much market share as many people expect it to given Intel's perpetual backfire on 10nm. Apple is another story altogether and probably dwarfs AMD and Nvidia combined.
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Yeah but I do think zen 2 chips are going to killer products. And sell like hot cakes. Apparently they will have 10-15% ipc uplift and with boosted clocks from 7nm. It's going to be some exciting times.

That alone with epic based zen 2 chips. They will have larger chunk than nvidia I think on 7nm.
 
very very odd seeing as GF and TSMC both were "touting" their performance benefits/leads at 7nm, so this means that GF decided (maybe after talking with AMD and TSMC) that they just simply did not have the capacity to give to AMD for their upcoming stuff, or that they simply could not ensure good yields or pricing like TSMC "could" per wafer, or they are not as far along as they were heavily heavily hinting at for many months now.

or a combination of all this (other things) ?

I would have thought "the more the merrier" but I suppose internal numbers and product launches for these multi-multi billion dollar contract FABS (or fabs in general) they have to keep very close eyes on them to know what moves to make and the right time to make them or the potential to have an awesome day or lose massive $$$$$$$$$$$$$ and time is a very real possibility.

I know TSMC is massive compared to many foundries (examples of course would be Samsung, GF, UMC) but they can only produce so much per month as well (with a bunch of equally massive companies wanting the latest and greatest from these wafers, wast not all that long ago that AMD and Nvidia were "fighting" to get enough wafrers for their 28nm launches)

IMO all eggs in one basket is never a good thing, because should that basket break you are left in a terrible position (not able to meet orders, waiting way too long to line the shelves, no choice but to bump prices up higher than intially announced they would be ^.^)

I was just reading up on the various foundries, granted they make a crap ton of money, but for the insane amount of wafers/chips they push out annually it seems that they are not making "that much" compared to the amount fhe companies that make the final product (i.e Intel or Ngreedia, or Apple) end up pocketing.....still would like to have 1/1,000,000,000th of this coin for 1 month LOL.
 
dragonstongue said:
very very odd seeing as GF and TSMC both were "touting" their performance benefits/leads at 7nm, so this means that GF decided (maybe after talking with AMD and TSMC) that they just simply did not have the capacity to give to AMD for their upcoming stuff, or that they simply could not ensure good yields or pricing like TSMC "could" per wafer, or they are not as far along as they were heavily heavily hinting at for many months now.

or a combination of all this (other things) ?

I would have thought "the more the merrier" but I suppose internal numbers and product launches for these multi-multi billion dollar contract FABS (or fabs in general) they have to keep very close eyes on them to know what moves to make and the right time to make them or the potential to have an awesome day or lose massive $$$$$$$$$$$$$ and time is a very real possibility.

I know TSMC is massive compared to many foundries (examples of course would be Samsung, GF, UMC) but they can only produce so much per month as well (with a bunch of equally massive companies wanting the latest and greatest from these wafers, wast not all that long ago that AMD and Nvidia were "fighting" to get enough wafrers for their 28nm launches)

IMO all eggs in one basket is never a good thing, because should that basket break you are left in a terrible position (not able to meet orders, waiting way too long to line the shelves, no choice but to bump prices up higher than intially announced they would be ^.^)

I was just reading up on the various foundries, granted they make a crap ton of money, but for the insane amount of wafers/chips they push out annually it seems that they are not making "that much" compared to the amount fhe companies that make the final product (i.e Intel or Ngreedia, or Apple) end up pocketing.....still would like to have 1/1,000,000,000th of this coin for 1 month LOL.
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No. It made sense why they did it. They would have to invest too much money that they will never be profitable. So they have to stick to current gen and just focus on other chips they they don't have to produce on 7nm. GPUs and CPUs require continued advancement. They would have to spend like 20 billion going to 5nm and another 17 billion or something for EUV I think. I read most of the article at Anandtech and I think got those right. So they didn't see them making profit with continued investments like that. Since they aren't large enough to produce at the rate of TSMC and they can never recover that money. It wasn't a bad decision for them, it made sense since they had to invest so much and never had the capacity to make that money back. That is the main reason behind them just halting this kind of production.
 
So how does AMD come out of this considering the horrible contract they have with GF? Do they just pay GF a royalty on each CPU they produce at TSMC? And who made the bone headed move of signing that crazy contract? Which CEO? Such madness. It's a shame to see AMD held back by nonsense like this. Hopefully the fact that GF had to scrap their production on the new nodes is a legal out for AMD in the contract they have with them.
 
SickBeast said:
So how does AMD come out of this considering the horrible contract they have with GF? Do they just pay GF a royalty on each CPU they produce at TSMC? And who made the bone headed move of signing that crazy contract? Which CEO? Such madness. It's a shame to see AMD held back by nonsense like this. Hopefully the fact that GF had to scrap their production on the new nodes is a legal out for AMD in the contract they have with them.
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AMD had reworked their contract with GF a while back. I highly doubt AMD will be held liable If GF doenst even want to advance the process. I mean AMD already announced all their forth coming stuff will be made at TSMC so whatever they did, its already done. Likely GF will probably continue making ryzen 14/12nm processors such as the ryzen 1xxx and ryzen 2xxx and continue until untim end of their life and they both wall away at that point. Looks like AMD already moved on for their next gen chips.
 
NKD said:
AMD had reworked their contract with GF a while back. I highly doubt AMD will be held liable If GF doenst even want to advance the process. I mean AMD already announced all their forth coming stuff will be made at TSMC so whatever they did, its already done. Likely GF will probably continue making ryzen 14/12nm processors such as the ryzen 1xxx and ryzen 2xxx and continue until untim end of their life and they both wall away at that point. Looks like AMD already moved on for their next gen chips.
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14nm chips for embedded is still going to be popular I guess.
glofo is still going to improve 12\14nm and they'll manufacture chipsets and other chips I guess.

28nm is a really really really big process for accessory chips like chipsets, controllers etc

So I guess AMD will order a lot from GF but high performance from TSMC.
 
SickBeast said:
So how does AMD come out of this considering the horrible contract they have with GF? Do they just pay GF a royalty on each CPU they produce at TSMC? And who made the bone headed move of signing that crazy contract? Which CEO? Such madness. It's a shame to see AMD held back by nonsense like this. Hopefully the fact that GF had to scrap their production on the new nodes is a legal out for AMD in the contract they have with them.
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Signing that crazy contract, was the price of casting off GF in the first place.

They sold controlling interest in the spin off for $700 Million dollars. No one would buy the foundry business without a VERY long term contract guaranteeing business from AMD. That is how AMD got on the hook to keep buying Wafers from GF.

The only alternative was to just shut the whole thing down, and NOT get that 700 Million dollars that AMD probably needed badly.
 
This is awesome, TSMC doing 7nm, and intel can't even do 10nm. Man intel may lose a lot of business over the next year and so. Unless they do shady stuff to save them selves. This is great, good to see intel not being the only lead for once.
 
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