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For months, there's been speculation effectually the time to come of AMD's Zen CPU, as well every bit questions regarding the country of GlobalFoundries 14nm process engineering science. While the foundry initially canceled its own 14nm-XM procedure in favor of licensing Samsung's IP for the 14nm node, later reports claimed that the foundry was still having problem with Apple's A9 SoC. As a foundry, GlobalFoundries doesn't normally make major announcements on behalf of its customers, only today is an exception.

Samsung-GLOBALFOUNDRIES 14nm Collaboration - FINAL V2.ppt

According to GF, it has demonstrated "silicon success on the commencement AMD products using GlobalFoundries most advanced 14nm FinFET process technology… AMD has taped out multiple products using GlobalFoundries' 14nm Low Power Plus (14LPP) process engineering science and is currently conducting validation work on 14LPP product samples. Today'south announcement represents another significant milestone towards reaching total production readiness of GlobalFoundries' 14LPP process technology, which will attain loftier-book product in 2022. The 14LPP platform taps the benefits of iii-dimensional, fully-depleted FinFET transistors to enable customers like AMD to deliver more processing ability in a smaller footprint for applications that demand the ultimate in performance."

"FinFET applied science is expected to play a disquisitional foundational role beyond multiple AMD product lines, starting in 2022," said Mark Papermaster, senior vice president and chief technology officer at AMD. "Globalfoundries has worked tirelessly to achieve this key milestone on its 14LPP process. We look forward to Globalfoundries' continued progress towards full product readiness and expect to leverage the advanced 14LPP process technology across a wide set of our CPU, APU, and GPU products."

AMD's Zen is expected in late 2022, early 2022.

AMD'south Zen is expected in belatedly 2022, early on 2022.

14LP is the second generation of 14nm engineering science available at GlobalFoundries; the company demonstrated first-generation 14nm LPE dorsum in January. AMD's upcoming CPU architecture, Zen, is currently expected to debut at the end of 2022 or early on 2022, with Zen-based APUs following at an undisclosed later date.

High-powered CPUs on a depression-power process?

Last month we had an opportunity to sit downward and talk with GlobalFoundries about the particulars of its 14nm applied science and its technical partnership with Samsung. 1 question we had was whether or not Samsung's 14nm engineering science would be a good match for AMD's x86 CPUs. Samsung, after all, has no experience in the high-end, high-power CPU market, and its 14nm process node explicitly references low power designs.

Historically, CPU architectures that emphasized low-ability have had express clock frequency headroom and scaled relatively poorly to higher TDPs. This is one reason why ARM deployed technologies like big.Petty, and many of the changes that AMD made to its Kaveri and Carrizo line of processors were meant to cutting power consumption at the expense of maximum clock frequency. AMD has said that it intends to scale Zen across its entire production stack, which raises the question of whether or not a low-power process can continue up.

According to GlobalFoundries, it has the choice to customize its procedure technologies to the needs of individual customers. While AMD has previously stated that information technology will not pay for whatsoever custom silicon, our understanding is that this applies to major technology shifts. AMD, in other words, won't pay GlobalFoundries or TSMC to build a custom silicon line that suits a detail production. When it designed Bulldozer, AMD agreed to pay GF to build a 32nm PD-SOI (Partially depleted silicon-on-insulator). That doesn't mean the two companies tin't work together to adopt less drastic types of optimization.