AMD to Switch to GlobalFoundries' 28 nm SHP Node in 2015

[ZoneDymo]

AMD IS behind Intel and if they continue with their current trend they won't have to even bother competing with Intel.
They still have some nice products (APU's) but they have lost the high end and server market.

no they have not, plenty of servers and "the high end" out there use AMD

 

[Jorge]

AMD IS behind Intel and if they continue with their current trend they won't have to even bother competing with Intel.
They still have some nice products (APU's) but they have lost the high end and server market.

AMD is ahead of Intel with APUs by about a year. AMD's next discrete CPU referred to internally as Zen, which is coming in 2016 is a huge performance jump over existing Vishera and will put AMD right where they need to be in X86 CPU performance. It will be worth the wait.

For the server sector they will have both Zen and K12 which is 64-bit ARM CPUs that will cover many aspects of the commercial segment.

 

[kiddagoat]

AMD is ahead of Intel with APUs by about a year. AMD's next discrete CPU referred to internally as Zen, which is coming in 2016 is a huge performance jump over existing Vishera and will put AMD right where they need to be in X86 CPU performance. It will be worth the wait.

For the server sector they will have both Zen and K12 which is 64-bit ARM CPUs that will cover many aspects of the commercial segment.

Up front I have owned both AMD and Intel systems over the years.... Last AMD was the Phenom II 980 before I got my 2600K.

How can you be so certain the performance of Zen will be so huge that it will close the gap with Intel on both the Enthusiast and Server markets. I know you didn't say it directly but you hint at it. Everyone thought Bulldozer was going to be as revolutionary as the AMD64 was when it first came out, "It will be worth the wait". I wouldn't hold my breath. AMD has a history of delaying products and over promising while under delivering. Not saying it can't happen but I find it to be not as huge as some make it out to be.

 

[HumanSmoke]

Look at the poor performance gains Intel has made in recent node drops even with CPU new designs.

The baseline for comparison is a very good Sandy Bridge architecture. Of course the gains look minimal...

AMD gets more than that from fine tuning a current node.

...while AMD's gains arrive against the baseline of a flawed and poorly laid out Bulldozer. Compare Steamroller against Piledriver and the gains aren't nearly so impressive.

That's why arguing over node size is ignorant and futile.

Not really.
Smaller node gives the options for better product segmentation - which is a fairly important factor in securing markets, as evidenced by Intel being able to dial in SKUs tailored for individual clients ( the E5-2666v3 for Amazon and the E5-2698Av3 for Lenovo for example). The smaller node also allows a company to dial in a wider scope of area-ruled design, power/perf-ruled, or the option of packing in a higher transistor count - subsequently Intel's 22nm fabs currently churn out sub-70mm SoC's, 662mm^2 Haswell-EP's and just about every conceivable SKU in between.

AMD is ahead of Intel with APUs by about a year. AMD's next discrete CPU referred to internally as Zen, which is coming in 2016

So, AMD are ahead by a year, but are two years away from a new architecture, while Intel has Broadwell waiting in the wings and Skylake to arrive before AMD's parts....and that's assuming that AMD's product timetable is on time - hardly a given based on AMD's past/current track record.

Zen is a huge performance jump over existing Vishera and will put AMD right where they need to be in X86 CPU performance. It will be worth the wait.

You neither know either of these points as facts, nor are privy to the processor landscape (performance, pricing, availability) that these parts will have to compete in - unless you somehow know the performance of the Intel SKUs that Zen will be expected to compete against.
Your view is exactly the same as the rose-tinted outlook that AMD touted for Bulldozer in 2007 and 2008 when they expected (for some outlandish reason) that Intel would continue to field Core 2 Quad and that was the architecture Bulldozer would compete against.

For the server sector they will have both Zen and K12 which is 64-bit ARM CPUs that will cover many aspects of the commercial segment.

Good luck with that. The micro-server market seems more of a smoke and mirrors exercise than anything concrete, and since Intel own ~98% of the x86 server market, AMD really need not just a compelling product, but a comprehensive platform with enough upside to make server end users trash their Intel-based systems.

no they have not, plenty of servers and "the high end" out there use AMD

Legacy products.
From Mercury Research (pdf) latest publicly accessible server figures:
• With a 97.8% unit share Intel continues to dominate the server processor market. AMD has publically stated its interest in developing ARM-based server processors. We think that AMD might at some point choose to discontinue development of future x86 server-specific processors.
The preliminary release of the Mercury Research data did not include average selling price (ASP) information. For the March quarter, Mercury Research data implies that Intel’s server processor ASP (excl. Itanium) was $625 (versus $599 in the December quarter) and that AMD’s server ASP was $326 (versus $353 in the December quarter). • Intel said that its Data Center platform ASP increased 3% sequentially and increased 11% year over year in the June quarter.

 

[ZoneDymo]

Legacy products.
From Mercury Research (pdf) latest publicly accessible server figures:
• With a 97.8% unit share Intel continues to dominate the server processor market. AMD has publically stated its interest in developing ARM-based server processors. We think that AMD might at some point choose to discontinue development of future x86 server-specific processors.
The preliminary release of the Mercury Research data did not include average selling price (ASP) information. For the March quarter, Mercury Research data implies that Intel’s server processor ASP (excl. Itanium) was $625 (versus $599 in the December quarter) and that AMD’s server ASP was $326 (versus $353 in the December quarter). • Intel said that its Data Center platform ASP increased 3% sequentially and increased 11% year over year in the June quarter.

aka both are just fine

 

[Steevo]

The baseline for comparison is a very good Sandy Bridge architecture. Of course the gains look minimal...

...while AMD's gains arrive against the baseline of a flawed and poorly laid out Bulldozer. Compare Steamroller against Piledriver and the gains aren't nearly so impressive.

Not really.
Smaller node gives the options for better product segmentation - which is a fairly important factor in securing markets, as evidenced by Intel being able to dial in SKUs tailored for individual clients ( the E5-2666v3 for Amazon and the E5-2698Av3 for Lenovo for example). The smaller node also allows a company to dial in a wider scope of area-ruled design, power/perf-ruled, or the option of packing in a higher transistor count - subsequently Intel's 22nm fabs currently churn out sub-70mm SoC's, 662mm^2 Haswell-EP's and just about every conceivable SKU in between.

So, AMD are ahead by a year, but are two years away from a new architecture, while Intel has Broadwell waiting in the wings and Skylake to arrive before AMD's parts....and that's assuming that AMD's product timetable is on time - hardly a given based on AMD's past/current track record.

You neither know either of these points as facts, nor are privy to the processor landscape (performance, pricing, availability) that these parts will have to compete in - unless you somehow know the performance of the Intel SKUs that Zen will be expected to compete against.
Your view is exactly the same as the rose-tinted outlook that AMD touted for Bulldozer in 2007 and 2008 when they expected (for some outlandish reason) that Intel would continue to field Core 2 Quad and that was the architecture Bulldozer would compete against.

Good luck with that. The micro-server market seems more of a smoke and mirrors exercise than anything concrete, and since Intel own ~98% of the x86 server market, AMD really need not just a compelling product, but a comprehensive platform with enough upside to make server end users trash their Intel-based systems.

AMD has suffered the plague of poor processes for years now, as is shown in their still dismal IPC and power/performance metrics. They managed to overcome clock limitations with their last "FX" chips, but at the expense of atrocious power consumption and still poor Instruction Per Clock, caused mainly by poor branch prediction, deep instruction pipes and plagues of high cache latency.

Unless they either address the cache latency or somehow make their branch prediction magical they will still be slow, Jorge has no idea other than he seems to have a hard on for spouting how great AMD is, and copy pastas the same crap everywhere, so either he is a paid for AMD shill, or has a severe complex that requires a large amount of medication that is not taken.

AMD is a long way from screwed however, they have already made HSA work, and are offering a one chip solution that neither other player can offer, plus their continued advance in the low end market by choosing to make less has a lot going for them, they just need to get more PR/Advertisement about that segment.

 

[stinger608]

Well jeez, here we go again..................Yet another AMD/Intel flame war.................................Hmm, who could have seen that coming?????
Or............Just another flame war in general.................

 

[fullinfusion]

Well jeez, here we go again..................Yet another AMD/Intel flame war.................................Hmm, who could have seen that coming?????
Or............Just another flame war in general.................

Don't forget the ones that always complain. With such knowledge some of these flamers have I'm really dumbfounded that no one has given these ppl a job

Ah its funny as by just seeing someone's forum name you can already know what's going to be typed.

On point I hope amd do very well with there decision and climb on top again where they belong.

 

[HalfAHertz]

AMD is ahead of Intel with APUs by about a year. AMD's next discrete CPU referred to internally as Zen, which is coming in 2016 is a huge performance jump over existing Vishera and will put AMD right where they need to be in X86 CPU performance. It will be worth the wait.

For the server sector they will have both Zen and K12 which is 64-bit ARM CPUs that will cover many aspects of the commercial segment.

Were you hiding under a rock when we got the same fairytale about the first Phenom and later about Bulldozer?
. . .
Realistically looking AMD's original architectures have been worse off performance/efficiency wise compared to Intel more often than not.(the only notable exception being the Athlon series) But that has always been OK because AMD managed to compete incredibly well based on their awesome pricing. I dunno about you, but back in the days the only Intel CPUs I could get my hands on that were in my price range were crabby cut down Celerons...

Nowadays however Intel's manufacturing technology has evolved so far that it has become incredibly cheap for them to release decent CPUs while still maintaining their expected profit margins and AMD are finding it extremely hard to compete using their old tactics.


On a side note if a process is called "14nm", it doesn't mean that every part of the transistor is 14nm, it only means that some parts of a component can scale down to 14nm. I wouldn't be surprised if Intel's 14nm process and GF's 28nm have particular components that are quite similar in size.

 

[HumanSmoke]

I wouldn't be surprised if Intel's 14nm process and GF's 28nm have particular components that are quite similar in size.

I would have thought that measuring "components" is a waste of time. It is fairly well known that some aspects of FinFET actually increased over the previous 22nm planar process - which was actually desirable since more fin height (i.e contact area) was a prerequisite of the FinFET process. AFAIK, the main governing criteria for transistor density and viability of a process shrink - the interconnect pitch - is around 40% less for Intel's 14nm vs GloFo's 28nm SHP, which reflects the quick and dirty transistor density calc ( low density component considerations such as memory PHY aside)
Intel Broadwell-Y (14nm FF) : 1.3 billion transistors in a 82mm² die area = 15.85 million per mm²
AMD Kaveri (28nm SHP) : 2.41 billion transistors in a 245mm² die area = 9.837 million per mm²

 

[cadaveca]

The interesting part of this news is that if this pans out to be true, AMD's silicon process will be completely different from NVidia's, which can either decimate AMD's current GPU market share, or tank NVidia's share prices to pre 2005-levels. At the same time, AMD has had several years optimizing their GPU designs towards GloFo's silicon, with APUs, which actually bodes well for this transition. It also means closer integration between discrete GPU designs and APUs, and also the possibility of getting an entire APU (small CPU included) on a discrete card, allowing for better data control throughout the entire PC system, and a higher density of memory on discrete parts. Considering the data footprint required of 8K+ resolutions, this could not be a more prudent time for such a change to happen, and could also be why the GTX980 came out without any response from AMD.

And well, I've been saying for quite a few years now that AMD needed to make this move. So it pleases me that AMD finally "listens".

 

[repman244]

AMD is ahead of Intel with APUs by about a year. AMD's next discrete CPU referred to internally as Zen, which is coming in 2016 is a huge performance jump over existing Vishera and will put AMD right where they need to be in X86 CPU performance. It will be worth the wait.

For the server sector they will have both Zen and K12 which is 64-bit ARM CPUs that will cover many aspects of the commercial segment.

Source of that huge performance jump?

That's a different server sector you're talking about...ARM cannot compete with 18-core Haswell CPU's or even with the 12 core versions.

And the reason why intel isn't making huge improvements is because they don't have have, they are competing with their own CPU's. If they wanted they could just push out a 130W CPU on mainstream platform and be done with it.

 

[joyman]

Smaller node size is not always a good thing. With transistors this small there are big issues of separating P-N transitions. So this is why latest cpus cannot have high clocks. So I think that 16nm will be the end of silicon era at least for cpus. And for APUs cpu part is enough for gaming. Just check 1 module AMD variants is enough for gaming in laptops with low details. Intel counterparts sucks in this direction. AMD products are more balanced in this way. And when HSA evolves to use gpu part for float point co-processor APUs will be even more mainstream.

 

[repman244]

So I think that 16nm will be the end of silicon era at least for cpus.

They said the same for ~130nm and look where they got, they will find a way. Of course there there will be a physical limit but they aren't there yet.
AFAIK Intel has 10/7nm on roadmap and IBM has some prototypes on sub 10nm process.

The problem I keep seeing is that no manufacturer actually uses APU's in their laptops or should I say everyone prefers Intel (even if that means a more unbalanced setup).

 

[joyman]

Carbon is next element that will continue the electronics in the Nano/Pico era.

 

[HumanSmoke]

Carbon is next element that will continue the electronics in the Nano/Pico era.

Graphene and carbon nanotubes are still a ways off from commercial viability AFAIK, and there would still be overlap with conventional Germanium and Indium/Aluminium/Gallium Arsenide high electron mobility transistors which should still get the industry down to a 5nm process if EUV lithography tool makers like ASML get their act together as far as power requirement, wafers per hour, and yield are concerned.

For anyone interested in process tech, here's a link for Chipworks preview of the recently concluded 2014 IEDM. Well worth a read, and follow up.

 

[cadaveca]

Graphene and carbon nanotubes are still a ways off from commercial viability AFAIK, and there would still be overlap with conventional Germanium and Indium/Aluminium/Gallium Arsenide high electron mobility transistors which should still get the industry down to a 5nm process if EUV lithography tool makers like ASML get their act together as far as power requirement, wafers per hour, and yield are concerned.

For anyone interested in process tech, here's a link for Chipworks preview of the recently concluded 2014 IEDM. Well worth a read, and follow up.

Don't take this wrong, but who cares? so, 5nm from 16nm. That's what, 2 steps? 16-12-8-5? So, like, 10 years of further silicon development?

That makes AMD's "slower on process tech" a positive, not a negative.

 

[HumanSmoke]

Don't take this wrong, but who cares?

The guy I quoted who brought up carbon interconnects?

so, 5nm from 16nm. That's what, 2 steps? 16-12-8-5? So, like, 10 years of further silicon development?
That makes AMD's "slower on process tech" a positive, not a negative.

And?
I think you'll find that my posting in this thread has consisted of:
Providing links that Intel was indeed selling 14nm chips, as a poster had specifically asked for proof.
Disagreeing with a poster that AMD's next big chip will be on a 20nm node since just about every piece of evidence points to the processes not being suitable for large, fast, and power hungry IC's, and alerting someone to the fact that you need not estimate performance of GloFo's 28nm SHP process because it is being used in a mature shipping range of APUs
Disagreeing with Jorge over the relative merits of two architectures that haven't seen the light of day, but which Jorge supposedly has enough information to form a solid analysis...and debunked some FUD about how well AMD's server division is doing ( Just because there are Opteron systems in use it doesn't translate to continued meaningful sales, just as being able to buy 429 rebuild kits and spares means that FoMoCo still sells Torino's and Ranchero's)
A back-of-the-napkin comparison of Intel's 14nmFF and GloFo's 28nm SHP process.

I don't think I referenced AMD's "slower on process tech" in any of the posts and doesn't really affect them aside from financial aspects of their WSA's- if anything, posters turned this into an AMD vs Intel flamefest from the off, when the real story should have been Globalfoundries vs Intel vs Samsung vs the pure play foundries. I'm sorry if attempting to offset some OTT guerrilla marketing with some factual counterbalance is somehow worthy of censure.

FWIW, I also wouldn't put 10 years of silicon development into the "who cares" category. The past ten years have seen us move from 90nm Prescott P4's and Athlon 64's in addition to 130nm X800's and 110nm GeForce 6800's. Ten years represents a lot of history and a lot of future potential in the semicon industry. There is also an excellent chance that the business landscape and the players involved will not remain as it is today.

The interesting part of this news is that if this pans out to be true, AMD's silicon process will be completely different from NVidia's, which can either decimate AMD's current GPU market share, or tank NVidia's share prices to pre 2005-levels.

How do you arrive at that doomsday scenario? GloFo's 28nm SHP was not only tailored to AMD's requirements, but has been successfully applied to GPU related products for the past year so I doubt it represents any kind of gamble. Also not too sure how this is supposed to crater Nvidia's share price - even if Fiji and Bermuda are the second coming of Christ. How would it be any different to 2009-10 when AMD fielded an all new landmark Evergreen series and Nvidia was still dicking around with a two-generation-old G92?
A new range of 28nm GPUs isn't suddenly going to overturn Nvidia's 80% workstation market share, its 85% HPC GPGPU share, or its mobile GPU share (for which AMD's large die GPU seems somewhat unsuited for in any case) - and with $3.2bn in cash on hand and an ongoing share buy-back scheme in place it seems unlikely that the share price will crater because of some desktop GPU business from AMD*. Even if Nvidia had nothing for 2015 - no GM 200, no GM 206, they'd still spin Pascal and Volta, and they'd still have the pro market ecosystems - no different to the situation in September 2009, except now they have high profile OpenPOWER contracts and some SoC automotive stuff going on.

If 28nm SHP were the beginning of some long term advantage I could understand the viewpoint, but we both know that the node is a stopgap until TSMC's 16nmFF+ and Samsung/GloFo's 14nm-XM arrive. So, unless you see 14nm being demonstrably better than 16nm and Nvidia being completely locked into TSMC rather than shopping around to Samsung, GloFo, or UMC, it seems that the playing field will again be in flux in late 2015.

* Quite possible that Nvidia's share price drops to 2004-05 levels ($5-7), but IMO that would require a something with the ability to hit harder than AMD - say, the lawsuit/countersuit business with Samsung/Qualcomm and loss of emerging SoC markets.

 

[Fx]

You people are looking at this waaay too much from an enthusiast perspective.
The general population (aka 99% of the buyers of these products) wont give 2 shits whether its 14 or 22nm in their laptops.

Thank you.

I'm not sure how so many people overlook this. Perhaps it is because they have never been a sysadmin or similar supportive role.

Node size is not the only actor, but it helps. Frankly, at the end of the day, I kinda always buy the stuff that offers me the most performance for the least money. My HD7950 is not the most power efficient either, but the performance it keeps on delivering for the time since I've bought it, it's just awesome. So awesome that I'm still hesitating to buy seemingly superior GTX 970.

Great point. I am still rocking my 7970. Perhaps next year I'll think about upgrading.

 

[joyman]

Tech process is beyond the point where frequencies can be maximized. So it will be difficult to make enough progress to counter the lower frequencies. So smaller tech process will not be automatically good thing. And implementing smaller nodes is more and more difficult, add to this first implementations of node process that are bulk ones and not that effective and with lower yields. So this rush is going to end soon.

 

[Steevo]

Tech process is beyond the point where frequencies can be maximized. So it will be difficult to make enough progress to counter the lower frequencies. So smaller tech process will not be automatically good thing. And implementing smaller nodes is more and more difficult, add to this first implementations of node process that are bulk ones and not that effective and with lower yields. So this rush is going to end soon.

End soon, like when we reached 90nm and they said we couldn't go further, intro immersion lithography, then from there Intel and many others have managed to take it past the 30nm wall it was supposed to hit. Even though some are only half truths in size as the transistors become 3D.

We will reach the smallest node we can reach before we have the next substance ready to step in, and this is all due to quantum tunneling effects and how many electron volts it will take to activate a gate VS how many can breach the insulation pattern to run to the drain. Its then that better design practice will start making a difference, and when we start learning to use different doping elements to lower the capacitive threshold that is the biggest weakness in current transistor design, and from there I am guessing it will be down to the distance electrons have to travel VS the speed of light in the substance that will be the next threshold, hell we are already having to plan for it.

 

[joyman]

I mean that with all the problems with process minimization the design of the chip is getting much more important, because smaller node is not solving all the problems of old designs as before. Progress is happening, but not like it was done before.

 

[Prima.Vera]

...So I think that 16nm will be the end of silicon era at least for cpus. ...

What are you talking about? 14nm is already selling 5nm is bound in 5 years. And those are confirmed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock#Roadmap)
Also they are already talking about atomic level transistors for the next 10 years, so no worries.
Working prototypes are already tested since 2012
(

)

 

[Steevo]

I mean that with all the problems with process minimization the design of the chip is getting much more important, because smaller node is not solving all the problems of old designs as before. Progress is happening, but not like it was done before.

Smaller nodes never fixed anything, you cannot just physically shrink a design to the next process node and call it good without some rework, the VIA's (passages through the silicon substrate the electrical power passes through) get smaller and may not supply sufficient voltage, the different ways the traces run and pass through the silicon needs reworked, the cache needs reworked, essentially you have to respin the whole die template.


The benefit comes from a design with the size in mind, maximizing the efficiency of the die to use the tooling available, look at what Nvidia did with the 9xx series VS the shit AMD has with the 295, the 295 is a turd while the 9xx series is simply amazing. Same process node, same basic technology, but Nvidia simply designed a much, much more efficient core in every metric.