AMD Confirms 20nm Products Moved to FinFET, Warns on Q2’15 Earnings
by Ryan Smith on July 6, 2015 4:55 PM EST- Posted in
- AMD
- CPUs
- GlobalFoundries
- 20nm
- GPUs
- 16nm
- 14nm
- Financial Results
A little bit ago AMD sent out an announcement updating their official outlook for the second quarter of 2015. Though we don’t typically publish financial projections, the long and short of it is that AMD is looking to brace investors for a worse than expected Q2, after an already difficult Q1. Soft APU sales are being blamed for dragging down both revenue and gross margins, with AMD now expecting Q2 revenue to be down 8% sequentially, or around $950M, while the non-GAAP gross margin will be just 28%.
Much more interesting however is this little nugget of information buried in the announcement towards the end, offering a short update on AMD’s 20nm plans. AMD had previously announced their intentions to bring out some products at 20nm – these were most likely just APUs, with the only one we explicitly know about being the now-canceled Skybridge. In any case, AMD is now confirming that they have moved several of their 20nm designs to a “leading-edge FinFET node,” and as far as we know AMD no longer has any further 20nm projects in the pipeline. AMD’s press release does not state which foundries these products are now at – or indeed if they’re at multiple foundries – so it’s unknown at this time whether the work is at TSMC, GlobalFoundries, or split between the two of them.
The rationale for announcing this shift at this time comes from the financial aspect. AMD will be taking a $33M charge to their GAAP gross margin as part of the work required to move these designs to a new node. Jumping to FinFET nodes should improve the competitiveness of these products, and greatly so in the case of anything that needs to clock high or is otherwise heavily exposed to leakage, but of course this will take additional time and engineering resources in order to transition these products.
We expect AMD to discuss the issue in at least a bit more depth later next week, when they hold their Q2 earnings call on July 16th.
Source: AMD
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BMNify - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
what you want is already on the market: Asus Zenbook UX305, very good review on Anandtech, got 8GB/256GB SSD/ 1080p for $700, Microsoft store had it on sale at $600 last month and we may see similar price at other amazon sales and Black friday sales later in the year.TheJian - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-radeon-r9-...Maybe you guys should do an article on AMD's pump/coil whine problems?? I mean you dedicated a 4 page article to Nvidia's .5GB being slower than the other 3.5GB on 970's. Your FuryX article mentioned pump whine being fixed, which tomshardware just proved is inaccurate at best, lies at worst. AMD is now going to assist OEMS on RMA costs.
I'd think this would merit an article as long as 970's paper change article right? LOL. Tomshardware was 4 pages on discovering what the issues are on AMD's problem. You'd think you guys could at least MENTION it and the RMA info for folks who got SHIPPED PUMP WHINERS, and possibly coil whine too. Never mind, I forgot...AMD portal site. ;) Unlike the PAPER mistake for NV that did not change the 970's results one bit from the review benchmarks (and Ryan saying he was still looking for corner cases to prove a problem!), AMD's mistake is RMA worthy and perhaps shoddy in how they're handling it as toms notes.
http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-fury-x-reportedly-s...
You can hear the coil/choke noise vid here. Pump vid too. Might want to wait for a while if a person is planning to buy one, as they are not marking which ones are FIXED on boxes.
"AMD’s Antal Tungler has confirmed that the problem exists in early production units. However a fix (for the pump whine) has been applied by Cooler Master USA and it is hoped that the problem has been resolved for future R9 Fury X units."
But that doesn't resolve the coil/choke issue. Just the pump. So how many have the 2nd issue?
Zen can't come soon enough, as APU/consoles were a waste of valuable R&D. Dirk was right ~2011 when he left (was forced out really), saying they needed to concentrate on CORE GPU/CPU, not this other junk which weakens the core stuff. Same thing some other guy said when consoles came up, Jen something... :) If they put out a ZEN chip on 16finfet+ it should be able to take the perf lead if it is sized even to Intel's die size on 14nm. They dedicate 1/2 of their cpu (actually slightly more) to gpu side now, so a die size of CPU only should have no trouble taking Intel down (if IPC is what AMD says it is), at least until Intel can respond with one of their own sans gpu and enlarged (that takes time). That would give AMD PRICING POWER, finally again for at least a while. Note having a king cpu led to the last time AMD made money quarter after quarter ;) Too bad AMD didn't listen to DIRK and put out ZEN in 2011-2012 instead of going console crap in ~2010/11 or so for xbox1/ps4 designs. That is about when they gave up the cpu race of course. Bummer. Dirk wanted APU's etc to come AFTER they had a CPU/GPU king.
Morawka - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
I wouldnt trust toms hardware with my worst enemy after they inflated Fury X benchmarks scores. Toms Fury X Scores were 30% higher than every other tech site.they paited fury x as beating the 980 Ti in 80% of benchmarks, when it doesn't even beat the Ti in 20% of the gaming benchmarks.
Lolimaster - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
AMD, if you don't release an 896-1024 Zen APU by 2016 (better with 2GB HBM 2.0), just sell yourself to someone else.TesseractOrion - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
Anandtech definitely needs a better, more up-to-date comments section. Is it going to happen? On T: Maybe a big Chinese company will invest (if they're allowed to by the US Govt)?ThomasS31 - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
Probably the console APU/SOC products... and other custom SOCs they produce for partners.nikaldro - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
I think AMD would stand a good chance if they produced dual and quad core + IGP parts for the cheap, mass market AND IGP-less quad octa cores for the performance market, while ceasing to compete in the "extreme" market (not that the FX 9000 series was worthy of the extreme title).I'm not familiar with servers, so i'll avoid the matter.
nikaldro - Tuesday, July 7, 2015 - link
* i meant quad AND octa cores.silverblue - Wednesday, July 8, 2015 - link
...but, they do...nikaldro - Wednesday, July 8, 2015 - link
No they don't.FXs are dinosaur old design, while athlons miss the L3 cache.
PLUS, they aren't actually 8 cores.
And it took them years to get to this point.
If they started right off the bat with the right approach, i think they could really pose a threat to intel