Samsung to start making new 14nm chips for AMD

Samsung to start making new 14nm chips for AMD

 

According to a report from Reuters, Samsung Electronics is going to be making chips for AMD suing their new 14nm FinFET Process in 2016. 

AMD’s CEO Lisa Su has already stated that they “have actually just taped-out our first couple of FinFET designs,” meanings that the majority of the investment required in creating these products has already been made. 

For those who are unaware a “tape-out” is the final stage of the design cycle of an integrated circuit, meaning that AMD will be at a stage where they will be able to get their first production sample of these chips within the next few months.  

 

 

Typically it takes 9 months to a year for a product to move from it’s initial tape-out to mass production, so if AMD have taped-out these products within the last few months we can expect to see new FinFET based products around late Q3 2016 or early Q4 2016.

We already know that AMD’s new Zen CPUs will be made using an energy efficient FinFET process, with a release at some point in 2016. It is highly probable that the products which have been taped-out by AMD are  Zen based CPUs. 

 

 

AMD’s Zen CPUs are designed to have 40% higher instructions per clock than their current Excavator designs, meaning that these CPUs will have a significant performance advantage to their current desktop Piledriver and Steamroller based CPUs.

Beyond 2016 AMD plans to continue to increase the IPC of future CPU designs based on Zen, such as Zen + and other future CPU architectures.

 

 

A lot of AMD’s future depends on these future FinFET based products, as this will be a CPU release which should be highly competitive with Intel’s high end CPUs and will be based on a much processing node which is actually competitive with Intel’s current 14nm.

Next year will be an exciting time for AMD, especially in the CPU department. Personally I hope that AMD does find success over the next few years as simply put a strong AMD will mean that Nvidia and Intel will just have to work that much harder to stay on top, which is a great thing for us consumers. 

Right now AMD have not announced who their manufacturing partner will be for their future FinFET Products, but if this report is correct it seems to be Samsung. 

 

You can join the discussion on AMD using Samsung’s 14nm FinFET Process on the OC3D Forums.