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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."
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?"
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
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?
I hope you like $500 celerons...
If this was 1995, I'd believe it. In 2011, Intel competes with itself. If they drive up CPU prices, they won't be able to make more and more profits because people do *NOT* need to upgrade. The vast majority of the population is doing fine on a dual core 4+ year old CPU running a browser and IM program and watching videos. Since people do not need to upgrade, but Intel has to sell more and more CPUs, their profits would collapse and then the stock and then ... hilarity ensues.
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.
Wow.. um. I'm currently running a 4yo handmedown computer with a Pentium D. I have a browser running, xchat, gedit, and I'm listening to pandora. And the only thing I would need a new CPU for is so I can a: watch 720p html5 video, or b: compile GCC in a fraction of the time. However, if I guessed, the vast majority of the population only uses their computer for a web browser containing facebook and youtube. I know people who /only/ use their computer for facebook (and that's when they're not using their phone for it).
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.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
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.
In 2011, Intel competes with itself.
That's part of the problem. One of the speculated reasons the Atom processor is so far behind, is that Intel was afraid it would cannibalize more profitable segments of its mobile CPU market. As a result, they launched it with a bunch of contractual restrictions on it (customers had to agree not to use it in any notebook larger than 10"-form factor), while using pricing models that discouraged 3rd party graphics (Atoms bundled with Intel's chipset were sometimes actually cheaper than solo Atoms, making nVidia ION combos uneconomical).
Since AMD had no strong CPUs in the netbook segment, everyone had to simply accept these restrictions at first, until AMD introduced their Ontaria and Zacate series.
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.
Oh, they can go slower. The world market is still expanding both in size and average price they can afford, companies will still buy them for their X years of support, laptops break down and so on. Intel wouldn't drive prices up as such, they'd bring costs down. Sell 22nm processors at same prices as 32nm processors, does that sound massively profitable to you? It does to me. In the end they'll sell you something that costs like an Atom for the price of a 2600K. Or maybe just slow down their tick-tocks, let each generation soak up twice the profits. I doubt Intel would let AMD die though, that'd bring too much anti-trust scrutiny on their total domination of the world's computers. At death's door would be just fine though.
In any case, I find this news unlikely. TSMC has crap record for delivering on time with decent yields, their 32nm process was so bad it got scrapped and the 28nm process is still struggling from what I gather. The only reason they've not been slain in the market for that is that both AMD and nVidia depend on them now so the graphics market just took a timeout. If Intel had a real graphics division they'd be eating them for lunch by now. GlobalFoundries is what used to be AMD proper, if they aren't able to do 28nm then they've got a total of zero reliable production facilities if you ask me. And Intel's already doing volume production on 22nm....
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Or get an i5-2500k which is faster than a lot of the x6s for only.like 20 bucks more.
Intel i5 661: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115217&Tpk=i5%20661
According to these benchmarks, we have:
And this doesn't account for the money spent on a motherboard, which adds a hefty price to any intel offering.
So, looks like you botched your careful number check.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
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.
I got an AMD Phenom II X4 840 for $59.99 a few days ago (at Microcenter); I'm sure it's more than half as fast as a 965, so it's an even better value. I got a new motherboard (AMD 760G chipset) with it too; it was also $59.99. Not bad, I think -- would I have been able to find an Intel solution for that price/performance?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
I wouldn't be too sure about that. The Pentium Pro failed miserably as a CPU offering, yet ended up as the basis for the Pentium 2 and 3, and then the Pentium M, and going forward. Just because Bulldozer in its first release has done poorly may be due to some design issues that we just don't know about, and in the next rev, may be fixed.
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.