AMD Cancels 28nm APUs, Starts From Scratch At TSMC

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @08:20AM from the changing-horses dept.

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."

2 of 149 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Global Foundries by Anonymous Coward · 2011-11-22 08:42 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Re:Take your time, let software catch up. by Bengie · 2011-11-22 08:58 · Score: 5, Informative

With multi-core CPUs, just because you can't reach 100% usage doesn't mean your not CPU limited.