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."

Comments

Take your time, let software catch up.

[Kenja]

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.

Re:Take your time, let software catch up.

[CSMoran]

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.

Just because your usage scenario is not CPU-bound does not mean everyone else's is.

Re:Take your time, let software catch up.

[marcosdumay]

The change in feature size won't just be usefull to get faster processors (altough servers could use some of them), it is also important to reduce the power footprint of the chips (that being AMD, it means both CPU and GPU will use less power) and to reduce the price of those chips.

Re:Take your time, let software catch up.

[Skarecrow77]

... ok. I'll bite.

If you -know- that it's not stable, why didn't you clock it back down to spec, or at least down to where you can be sure it is truly 100% stable? Aren't you losing more time by doing multiple redundancy checks on your resultant data sets than you're gaining by the few extra clock cycles?

you are doing random spot checks on your data, right?

As anybody who has lived with an -almost- stable overclock for long periods of time knows, if it's not 100% stable, you're getting little computational data errors here and there that are going to add up long term to "omfg my data is borked and has been for 6 months and I didn't even realize".

Re:Take your time, let software catch up.

[PRMan]

Seriously, this.

In building computers for my wife and my brother, I just went with lower end I3 and Phenom X2(4) processors. Why? Because the effective performance difference between the two for the applications they are running is .001%. And the price difference between those and say, an I7 is 1000%.

But I made sure to get both systems SSD drives. Price difference? About 200% (500GB HDD $60 vs 128GB SSD $125). But the performance difference is about 700%.

Re:Take your time, let software catch up.

[Kjella]

Looking at forthcoming offerings, AMD especially seems to be assuming that we're all constantly using our CPUs to run handbrake 24/7 or batch encode a couple hundred wavs to mp3 at a time, and thus would love 12 cores.

I think it's quite obvious that AMD didn't have the resources to hit many targets, so they picked two:

1) Laptops/Low-end PCs with Bobcat cores (Fusion/Llano APUs)
2) Servers with Bulldozer cores (Valencia/Interlagos)

Sadly the latter seems to have misfired a bit even in the server arena, but it's no question IMHO that the high-end desktop market was intentionally abandoned. Either that or they've missed their design targets by many miles, they can't have been that off on single core performance. I can sort of understand, Intel was already dominating and the Atom threatened their low end (remember, CPU designs have a 2-3 years lead time) and they couldn't afford to lose their bread and butter machines. So they aimed Bobcat low (power), Bulldozer wide (cores) and left Intel to compete with themselves. Not to be too much of a cynic, but it's better for AMD to win some markets than being a loser in all of them.

Extremely useful summary

[bigredradio]

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.

Re:AMD = Stagnated.

[GreatBunzinni]

Your assumption that you can simply ignore AMD's influence in the CPU market and still end up with a relevant model to explain and predict its outcome is both naive and disingenuous. AMD does have products which outperform equivalent Intel products, even when not accounting with Intel shenanigans such as relying on funny compiler tricks, and AMD happens to price them quite attractively. If you haven't considered any AMD offering on any budget for any serious desktop and instead opted to rely only on Intel products then you are both clueless and economically-challenged.