AMD launches first 7 nm hardware this year via TSMC

Last month, Nvidia dominated the news, but AMD now wants attention too. They announce that the world’s first 7 nm CPU will be launched this year. In 2019, several other 7 nm hardware baked by TSMC will follow.

AMD has announced in an official announcement that later this year it will place the world’s first graphics card at 7 nanometres on shop shelves. It hopes this will take away some of the attention around Nvidia’s new RTX cards. Which GPU is involved, Radeon or Radeon Pro, AMD does not clarify. However, it is clear that TSMC will bake the chips for AMD after they have made a new agreement with each other.

Dirt bin

This agreement was reached after GlobalFoundries decided to dispose of its 7 nm process. It plans no further developments and now focuses on further optimisations of the 14 nm and 12 nm processes with FinFET technology.

Read this: Samsung is the first to show EUV details for 7 nm chips

According to CEO Tom Caulfield, GlobalFoundries’ customers have little interest in the 7 nm architecture. Instead, he believes they prefer to stick to the current architectures and look for other ways to further improve performance.

AMD was already planning to bake its new generation of GPUs at 7 nm at TSMC, but now the processors will be added as well, starting in 2019.

Vega architecture

The 7 nm chips become particularly important for AMD. A successful launch will further increase the pressure on Intel as it struggles to get its 10nm process up and running. The first 7 nm CPUs are expected in the first half of 2019. The new chips would be based on the new generation Zen 2 x86 64-bit cores.

The new GPU would be an improved version of the Vega architecture that AMD launched last year. Reducing a chip usually involves higher clock speeds, better energy efficiency and more memory bandwidth. Wait and see when AMD reveals more details later this year.