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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.
Build your own fab
Who cares about the designs when my AMD GPU doesn't run software properly because Nvidia has a special deal with that software company? And visa-versa? Stop worrying about design and fix the real problem...your current products are unreliable because of greed.
So, this is why we can't have nice things?
Who didn't see not having their own fabs was going to bite them in the rear?
Only a bunch of bean counters would not have seen this coming.
Interesting that they both use the same supplier for their critical component and are competing products....I'm guessing neither have enough money to build their own production labs like Apple did with that special glass they use. Imagine how amazing they would be as a joint company.
I certainly wouldn't expect to see it happen(well, maybe with a very low probability); but it wouldn't surprise me if someone at Intel Legal has written up an "AMD/Foundry Contract Opinion.doc" and squirreled it away somewhere.
Given that AMD isn't terribly threatening anymore, we aren't in the Netburst vs. A64 beatdown era now, Intel is probably saved a fair amount of unpleasant antitrust inquiry(US and abroad) by AMD at comparatively limited cost in product margins or lost design wins. If it came to it, selling them foundry services would probably be preferred to letting them die.
Yes, they spun them off into Global Foundries.
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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Your shortsighted business practice of selling off your foundry has just killed you. It's gonna suck having Intel as the monopoly for the X86 CPU market.
Because AMD is an abbreviation of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) therefore it's proper English to capitalize all the letters.
You have a low enough user account number to know that.
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
The only other manufacturer with 14nm capacity is Intel and there's no way Intel will sell them some capacity.
Riiiight. Because Intel never ever sells fab capacity.
Oh wait, they started doing that in 2010. Oops.
Just one. Nothing out of control. Intel has something like a dozen of them. Just build one. Then you have the ability to expand your own capacity using Intel's model of "EVERYTHING EXACTLY THE SAME" where in Intel copies their fabs exactly down to the furniture.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
...for the right price. There's no way for AMD or nvidia to agree to that price.
It's the same reason we import oil in the US - use up the capacity elsewhere and horde your own.
Glad to here you all understand this now. This is why I bought Intel stock 2 years ago. INTC the best chip fab in the world. Ultimately Apple, AMD, and nVidia will lose. Oh yeah, and I will profit! ;)
Have a look at Google news where headlines from many newspapers and journals are reproduced. You won't see many publishers capitalizing every single word.
"Proper English"? Your journalism text is from a different century. My copy of The Associated Press Stylebook (2005), says this: "*capitalization* In general, avoid unnecessary capitals. Use a capital letter only if you can justify it by one of the principles listed here." - I cannot find an exception for headlines.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Intel's ahead, but it kind of looks like they have a lot of difficulty too. There are so many different part #s, that it makes you wonder if they all tried to be the same thing, but different wafers passed different tests, and .. viola, diverse line of products!
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The ultimate story about the dangers of outsourcing is how Nokia destroyed its mobile phone business. Once upon a time Nokia and Texas Instruments had a very close working arrangement with TI being Nokia's fab partner. The two together had a complete phone solution. So how does Nokia treat TI in the mid 2000s: They decided to diversify their wireless chipset providers away from working with TI. Only Nokia forgot one thing: TI don't play in markets where it cannot be overall #1. TI will as fast as possible get out of business segments where it cannot lead. And so TI said to Nokia, bye by 2012. In 2009. By then Nokia had decided it wanted to get its ARM SoCs and wireless modems from the same supplier, and there was one natural candidate, especially since they were, and still are, the leaders in LTE: Qualcomm. Only there was one big problem: Nokia had been caught in a patent war with Qualcomm for years trying to put Qualcomm out of business. It was Nokia that wound up having to settle for billions of US dollars, and suddenly it was at the mercy of the company to whom it had been an existential threat. Oops.
Actually, they may not. It boils down to what you define as "Samsung". "Samsung" is a lose collection of companies with crossholdings. IIRC, the fab plants are in a different company than the company that does the cell phones. Besides, just because you can make one bit of the phone (CPU) does not mean are the best at making other bits of the phone. I think they have farmed out the cell network bits out.
If you want the biggest bang for your buck, a single 12" Vertical Semiconductor furnace shipped and installed - $900K - $1m USD (low end guess). I've been to Taiwan into another fab, UMC, and they have hundreds of these furnaces. But with wafers that big, you need an automated transfer system (because you can't trust people to carry $10,000 worth of substrate) Wafer boats, typically holding 13 wafers, are $2000-$3000 each. the substrate itself is incredibly expensive. And not to mention the electrical bills...running one of these furnaces requires heating a 12" Diameter tube to up to 1200C....usually 480 volts into them. With the Silicon Carbide process tubes needing to be replaced every 3-4 months, and the heating elements getting an average 1 year lifespan, that's a LOT of money.
I don't blame them for not wanting to open their own fabs!
And push our Apple or Samsung or Qualcomm for the right price. Again, AMD and NVidia can't or won't pay what that price would be.
AP style is to only capitalize the first word and proper nouns
https://www.apstylebook.com/?d...
search for "News media" and read the questions that follow
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Why wouldn't Intel sell some of their capacity to nVidia or AMD for their GPUs? It's not like Intel directly competes with them (yet) in the high end GPU market and high end GPUs help sell new computers with Intel CPUs. I mean if Intel needs full production to fill orders, then of course they wouldn't sell capacity. But baring that (or engineering limitations), there should be no reason for them to refuse to sell capacity.
Intel has such a shit reputation with the GPU/gamer crowd that they'd profit more by leasing those fabs to AMD/Nvidia (strictly on GPU production, i doubt they'd allow AMD to make CPU's on it), whom can actually market and sell GPU's.
the foundry could make more money letting AMD/NVidia use their stuff than Apple.
In what alternate universe? Apple had nearly $183 billion in revenue in 2014. Nvidia had $4.2 billion in 2014 and AMD had $5.3 billion in 2013. How exactly would they make more money from companies whose yearly revenues combined are less than a single quarter of Apple's revenue?
Current videocards work great. You can play all kinds of games in plenty of beautiful detail. So to get someone to buy a new video card, well you have to offer them a reason. If your new card isn't enough faster, or more efficient, or enough new features, or whatever then people will say "Nah, I'm good," and stick with what they got.
So they do have a need to move forward on tech, if they want to stick around.
They only have one 14nm fab right now, and it only makes Intel chips. Maybe they'd sell some 22nm, I dunno, and that might be of interest for a GPU, but they aren't selling 14nm at this time near as I know.
Intel really goes all in on R&D. It isn't just that they make a lot of money, their percentage of R&D investment is very high, and they don't cut it in down times to try and squeeze out numbers. That snowballs in the long term and is why they had a 14nm process running when others were still struggling to finalize their 20nm.
Also a lot of the architectural arguments regarding Motorola v Intel were bogus. It was programmers arguing on academic issues that maybe theoretically should matter, but didn't actually make a different performance wise in final implementation. Little endian would be a good example. Plenty of people act like that is a hugely bad choice, yet it actually matters fuck all.
The article is about GPUs.
ATI was fabless, and though AMD did still own their own fabs for three years after the ATI acquisition, that was completely irrelevant since TSMC still fabbed all the chips anyways. There were rumblings about doing some chips on AMD's own fabs but it never came to pass.
So the grandparent is right. ATI / AMD Graphics and Visual Solutions and nVidia have both always been fabless.
People who think owning your own fabs is always fabulous are disconnected from the realities of the semiconductor industry. It just isn't feasible for most companies to duplicate all the huge material and R&D investments that have to be continually at full throttle just to have any chance to compete in the fab space. Gamers, who care disproportionately about retail add-in graphics cards, routinely overestimate the size of the graphics card industry; Intel's revenue is over 10x either nVidia's or AMD's. Only a fab that gets a lot more business than just nVidia's can possibly hope to compete. TSMC fits that bill.
Where is the Chinese knock-off AMD and nVidia chips then that are just as good, but cheaper?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Also, most of the phones I see w/ people around me are iPhones. I rarely see a Galaxy or a Lumia. I wonder why people claim that Apple's phone demand is falling? I don't recall seeing lines for new phones from Samsung or Microsoft the way it was when the iPhone 6 was released
Samsung was never mentioned in the article, only in the summary.
Samsung also offers Foundry services, used for previous Apple chips for example, so I highly doubt they use up TSMC's capacity.
No I mean, Intel GPU tech has a shit reputation and the brand will not hold up in the gamer market if they transition into it.
The discrete GPU market is not large enough to interest Intel and it is getting smaller as integrated GPUs gain performance.