Wednesday, May 6th 2015
AMD Readies 14 nm FinFET GPUs in 2016
At its ongoing Investor Day presentation, AMD announced that will continue to make GPUs for every segment of the market. The company is planning to leverage improvements to its Graphics CoreNext architecture for the foreseeable future, but is betting on a huge performance/Watt increase with its 2016 GPUs. The secret sauce here will be the shift to 14 nm FinFET process. It's important to note here, that AMD refrained from mentioning "14 nm," but the mention of FinFET is a reliable giveaway. AMD is expecting a 2x (100%) gain in performance/Watt over its current generation of GPUs, with the shift.
AMD's future GPUs will focus on several market inflection points, such as the arrival of CPU-efficient graphics APIs such as DirectX 12 and Vulkan, Windows 10 pulling users from Windows 7, 4K Ultra HD displays getting more affordable (perhaps even mainstream), which it believes will help it sell enough GPUs to return to profitability. The company also announced an unnamed major design win, which will take shape in this quarter, and which will hit the markets in 2016.2015 will be far from dry for the company, as it will introduce its first GPU that will leverage HBM, offering double the memory bandwidth of GDDR5 at half its power draw. The company announced that its HBM implementation will see memory dies placed on the same package as its GPU die, so we will no longer see graphics cards with memory chips surrounding the GPU ASIC. The company will announce a few new high-end graphics cards around Computex 2015.
AMD's future GPUs will focus on several market inflection points, such as the arrival of CPU-efficient graphics APIs such as DirectX 12 and Vulkan, Windows 10 pulling users from Windows 7, 4K Ultra HD displays getting more affordable (perhaps even mainstream), which it believes will help it sell enough GPUs to return to profitability. The company also announced an unnamed major design win, which will take shape in this quarter, and which will hit the markets in 2016.2015 will be far from dry for the company, as it will introduce its first GPU that will leverage HBM, offering double the memory bandwidth of GDDR5 at half its power draw. The company announced that its HBM implementation will see memory dies placed on the same package as its GPU die, so we will no longer see graphics cards with memory chips surrounding the GPU ASIC. The company will announce a few new high-end graphics cards around Computex 2015.
30 Comments on AMD Readies 14 nm FinFET GPUs in 2016
I take that as saying they are able to succeed overall wafer methodologies, multi-patterning flows, and dynamic power density, but not necessarily able to provide any consistency or numbers of decent chips from the process (yield). Knowing the added mask steps (approx. 14 additional) so the understanding is from a wafer start-package-testing, to chip delivery FinFET would take several more weeks. (28nm~2.5mo’s vs. FinFET ~3mo’s).
Hell 90% of these Technews sites is brought out announcement aka PR work