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AMD, Nvidia Reportedly Tripped Up On Process Shrinks
itwbennett writes: In the fierce battle between CPU and GPU vendors, it's not just about speeds and feeds but also about process shrinks. Both Nvidia and AMD have had their move to 16nm and 20nm designs, respectively, hampered by the limited capacity of both nodes at manufacturer TSMC, according to the enthusiast site WCCFTech.com. While AMD's CPUs are produced by GlobalFoundaries, its GPUs are made at TSMC, as are Nvidia's chips. The problem is that TSMC only has so much capacity and Apple and Samsung have sucked up all that capacity. The only other manufacturer with 14nm capacity is Intel and there's no way Intel will sell them some capacity.
NVidia has always been fabless, but AMD owned its own fabrication plants until a few years ago... when they were spun off into a separate company called Global Foundries.
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Build your own fab
AMD did exactly that. Intel responded by raising their prices and offering "discounts" to vendors in exchange for refusing to stock any AMD products, ensuring that AMD's production capacity was wasted because customers found it incredibly difficult to find anyone willing sell them (despite having a large performance, price and temperature advantage over Intel at the time). AMD took Intel to court over this and won, but Intel managed to drag the case out so ridiculously long that AMD weren't able to keep their foundries. Their R&D took a big hit too.
I read an interview of John Sculley, ex Apple CEO, 10 years after he left Apple. (There is a link to it somewhere here on Slashdot. ) He said that one of his great mistakes was to choose Motorola's PowerPC RISC chip over Intel's x386 design. All of Apple engineers pulled for the Motorola chip, pointing to its better architecture. And it was true, for a given bit of silicon Motorola was better than Intel.
Except that Intel's fabs were so much more efficient than Motorola's, they were able to deliver more powerful chips at a cheaper price even with poorer design. Which allowed them to make fat profits, which they plowed back into newer fab plants, which let them sprint past Motorola.
AMD did not own the sever space. With the introduction of AMD64, they had superior CPUs. However, thanks to intel's illegal monopolistic deals with OEMs they didn't get the sales and profits to plough back into R&D and sustain their technical lead.