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AMD Cancels 28nm APUs, Starts From Scratch At TSMC
MrSeb writes "According to multiple independent sources, AMD has canned its 28nm Brazos-based Krishna and Wichita designs that were meant to replace Ontario and Zacate in the second half of 2012. The company will likely announce a new set of 28nm APUs at its Financial Analyst Day in February — and the new chips will be manufactured by TSMC, rather than its long-time partner GlobalFoundries. The implications and financial repercussions could be enormous. Moving 28nm APUs from GloFo to TSMC means scrapping the existing designs and laying out new parts using gate-last rather than gate-first manufacturing. AMD may try to mitigate the damage by doing a straightforward 28nm die shrink of existing Ontario/Zacate products, but that's unlikely to fend off increasing competition from Intel and ARM in the mobile space."
With all the issues at gloflo, this might be a good thing. But it looks like too little too late.
I thought this was all covered last week some time...
Maybe it's a dupe.
So far I have been totally unable to tax my current CPU past 40% utilization. I think we can take a break and let software catch up and older systems fall off the support map before the next generation of CPUs hit.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
It's TSMC, not TMSC.
Thank you.
AMD has no competition in APU arena. It is dominating it.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/21730/8
its actually possible to game with acceptable detail and fps with entry-mid level laptops without paying a fortune now.
Read radical news here
AMD = Stagnated. Take it out back and shoot it to put it out of it's misery.
The description is somewhat misleading in that Global Foundries is not a "long-time partner," but what were AMD's own internal wafer fabs until Global Foundries was spun out as a separate company in 2009.
Moving 28nm APUs from GloFo to TSMC means scrapping the existing designs and laying out new parts using gate-last rather than gate-first manufacturing. AMD may try to mitigate the damage by doing a straightforward 28nm die shrink of existing Ontario/Zacate products, but that's unlikely to fend off increasing competition from Intel and ARM in the mobile space
After reading the summary (a few times), I came to the conclusion that I know nothing about this topic. Thanks for the heads up so I that was not burdened with reading an article that only a select few might understand or care.
Flexible bare-metal recovery for Linux/UNIX
so far, all bobcat-based chips have been made at TSMC, haven't they? so is this really news?
Hopefully Global Foundries' issues don't impact Bulldozer, or AMD will fall even further behind in the performance desktop arena.
Calling Global Foundries AMD's "long-time partner" really dates "MrSeb", he must have started reporting tech news in the last three years. Global Foundries isn't just a "partner" to AMD, it's part-owned by AMD, and was spun out of AMD's manufacturing and merged with Chartered Semiconductor.
How bad is it when what used to be your in-house fab merits a last-minute change to a competitor's relatively different process?
You really should install an antivirus program.
Maybe this was a reason to spin it off, it was limited their options.
To bad Amd don't do something sensible for a change, like cancelling Bulldozer, and release a real 8 core Phenom II instead ...
All true; but, they're down to 9% ownership and according to the articles no longer have rights to appoint someone to the GloFlo board. Looks like the relationship is becoming increasingly sour.
Whether you buy AMD products or not, you can't ignore the fact that AMD is an important counter-balance to Intel. Without AMD, Intel would have a monopoly in CPUs which would bring prices up and innovation down until other competitors, like ARM, would fill in the gap, which could take some time.
X86 cpu manufacturer can and should survive. Maybe Intel or Microsoft or Apple will buy them out to put them out of their misery. The quicker customers can box themselves in the better. Choice is fleeting and obviously, chooses the current "best" processor is always in your "best" interest with no thought of the long term. But maybe Arm really is meant to eventually replace the X86 architecture.
The thought of hanging myself at my student loan organization doesn't bug me as much when I think it might make a differ
Intel has the Atom line (current generation is garbage) and the i3-23X7M ($100-$200 premium) that competes on the low end with AMD.
Intel Atom's next generation has no 64bit drivers or DirectX 10 for there PowerVR chipset:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Intel-Cedar-Trail-Atom-Won-t-Receive-64-bit-Graphics-or-DirectX-10-1-Driver-232915.shtml
__________________
Fusion "2.0" was already in the works:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mobile/display/20111121213529_AMD_Readies_Brazos_2_0_as_Krishna_Wichita_Get_Delayed.html
IIRC, these were scrapped because OEM's weren't going to design products around a 6-month lifecyle--hence they are skipping a generation.
Oh my god, there's less than 70 shopping days left!
It's tradition in my house that on Financial Analyst Day, or FAD as we call it, we make spiced wine and spike it with DMT, then sit around singing appropriate songs, such as "Money" by Pink Floyd, "Money (That's What I Want)" by the Beatles and "Gimme da Loot" by Biggie Smalls.
Then, sitting in a circle, we pass around a revolver with only one shell loaded and spinning the cylinder, we point at the person to the left and pull the trigger.
It's by far my favorite holiday.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yeah, and TSMC is the foundry that ATI has used for years (and still does). The plan with the APUs has always been to move ATI's GPU to AMD's^W Global Foundry's process. They have given up on that and decided to move AMD's CPU to the TSMC process instead. It's a pretty big turn of events.
APU unlikely to fend off increasing competition from Intel? Most Intel Atom based netbooks/tablets/whatever that I know have the GMA 3150. Which runs at 200 Mhz max. and has 2 shader units. The C-50 has 80 unified shaders running at 280 Mhz (yes, again low but I'm guessing 80 things working in parallel make up for it. please correct me if I'm wrong), supporting DX11,OpenGL 4.1 and UVD 3. Way better than Intel graphics cards. True, the CPU isn't very fast, but for things like video playback and 2D,3D games and other applications? It beats Intel hands down. I love Intel for their linux support but they just don't make graphics hardware for gaming.
A single part that has the cpu and the memory on a single pcb. Have 2, 4, 6 and 8gb models. Put the memory right next to the chip and eliminate complexity. You could still add ram to the mobo, but it would act as cache for other things like disk and video. You could even have multi-socket mobos, but the cpus would not share memory except through the secondary memory.
I have a neat little handheld Sony Vaio which has a 1.33Ghz Core Solo and a Intel GMA945 graphics adapter oh... and 1Gb RAM. It's an awesome machine but Windows XP was too heavy for it. Windows Vista was far to heavy for it. Windows 7 runs pretty nice on it. Windows 8 beta is much nicer, very usable. Android is ok on it... but I still don't know what the point of Android is. Meego wasn't too bad on it. Mac OS X Lion is a laughing joke on it.
All things considered, the operating systems are seriously improving on performance now.... The more they accelerate the desktop with the GPU and the more they work on power savings, the better the operating systems get. I think it pretty much started as functionality... then the trend went in to stability and security and now is moving in the direction of performance. With the world trying to fit more and more computer into their pockets instead of backpacks, the operating systems are being tuned for that.
Now apps on the other hand are another issue. One day, someone will even write an e-mail client that doesn't make my Core i7 2600K with 16 gigs of RAM and 500MB/s r/w SSD cry whenever I search my mail.