The 7nm process changeover of AMD is now fully the responsibility of TSMC and no longer in the traditional AMD factory GlobalFoundries.
AMD ensures that 7nm migration to TSMC has no impact on the roadmap.
The AMD Technical Director, Mark Papermaster, assured in an article that there will be no changes to the company’s product roadmap. AMD has already produced several 7nm products at TSMC, including the 7nm Vega chip scheduled for launch in 2018 and the first 7nm EPYC chip scheduled for launch in 2019. Both the Zen 2 architecture and the latest generation of the Navi GPU are also built at 7 nm by this manufacturer.
” TSMC’s work on its 7nm node went very well and we saw excellent results,” wrote Papermaster. The switch between GlobalFoundries and TSMC was described as part of the company’s “flexible production strategy,” says Papermaster.
According to Pat Moorhead, director of Moor Insights, existing 7nm AMD designs were already in the TSMC process. “I don’t think AMD had a relevant 7nm design on GlobalFoundries,” he tweets. So it appears that this is not an urgent matter, but that the migration from GlobalFoundries to TSMC has been taking place for some time.
GloblaFoundries announced that the company is moving away from the production of top chips and seems to be handing this sector over to TSMC, Samsung and other chip manufacturers who are willing to invest aggressively in large production lines. In contrast, AMD will maintain its existing and older 14 and 12 nm Ryzen, Radeon and Epyc lines at GlobalFoundries.