AMD to fab all 7nm chips at TSMC

This morning the news broke that AMD's chip fabrication partner Global Foundries is halting the 7, 5 and 3nm nodes for chip fabrication to gain more profitability on 12 and 14nm. While that might work short term, long term we think that could be a terrible decision for GloFo.

AMD is a big partner for among other upcoming things 7nm chips will be hit by this. However, from what we heard, AMD's current 7nm designs are already at TSMC. Also, all their console chips are fabbed at TSMC. AMD has released a small statement on what is happening, and have been anticipating their chip fabrication for 7nm with TSMC.

-- 7nm Update --

For the past several years we have been executing our multi-generational leadership product and architectural roadmap. Just in the last 18 months, we successfully introduced and ramped our strongest set of products in more than a decade and our business has grown dramatically as we gained market share across the PC, gaming and datacenter markets.

The industry is at a significant inflection point as the pace of Moore’s Law slows while the demand for computing and graphics performance continues to grow. This trend is fueling significant shifts throughout the industry and creating new opportunities for companies that can successfully bring together architectural, packaging, system and software innovations with leading-edge process technologies. That is why at AMD we have invested heavily in our architecture and product roadmaps, while also making the strategic decision to bet big on the 7nm process node. While it is still too early to provide more details on the architectural and product advances we have in store with our next wave of products, it is the right time to provide more detail on the flexible foundry sourcing strategy we put in place several years ago.

AMD’s next major milestone is the introduction of our upcoming 7nm product portfolio, including the initial products with our second generation “Zen 2” CPU core and our new “Navi” GPU architecture. We have already taped out multiple 7nm products at TSMC, including our first 7nm GPU planned to launch later this year and our first 7nm server CPU that we plan to launch in 2019. Our work with TSMC on their 7nm node has gone very well and we have seen excellent results from early silicon. To streamline our development and align our investments closely with each of our foundry partner’s investments, today we are announcing we intend to focus the breadth of our 7nm product portfolio on TSMC’s industry-leading 7nm process. We also continue to have a broad partnership with GLOBALFOUNDRIES spanning multiple process nodes and technologies. We will leverage the additional investments GLOBALFOUNDRIES is making in their robust 14nm and 12nm technologies at their New York fab to support the ongoing ramp of our AMD Ryzen, AMD Radeon and AMD EPYC processors. We do not expect any changes to our product roadmaps as a result of these changes. 

We are proud of the long-standing and successful relationships we have built with our multiple foundry partners, and we will continue to strengthen these relationships to enable the manufacturing capacity required to support our product roadmaps. I look forward to providing more details on those innovations as we prepare to introduce the industry’s first 7nm GPU later this year and our first 7nm CPUs next year.