AMD Cancels 28nm APUs, Starts From Scratch At TSMC 149
MrSeb writes "According to multiple independent sources, AMD has canned its 28nm Brazos-based Krishna and Wichita designs that were meant to replace Ontario and Zacate in the second half of 2012. The company will likely announce a new set of 28nm APUs at its Financial Analyst Day in February — and the new chips will be manufactured by TSMC, rather than its long-time partner GlobalFoundries. The implications and financial repercussions could be enormous. Moving 28nm APUs from GloFo to TSMC means scrapping the existing designs and laying out new parts using gate-last rather than gate-first manufacturing. AMD may try to mitigate the damage by doing a straightforward 28nm die shrink of existing Ontario/Zacate products, but that's unlikely to fend off increasing competition from Intel and ARM in the mobile space."
Re:AMD = Stagnated. (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope you like $500 celerons...
If this was 1995, I'd believe it. In 2011, Intel competes with itself. If they drive up CPU prices, they won't be able to make more and more profits because people do *NOT* need to upgrade. The vast majority of the population is doing fine on a dual core 4+ year old CPU running a browser and IM program and watching videos. Since people do not need to upgrade, but Intel has to sell more and more CPUs, their profits would collapse and then the stock and then ... hilarity ensues.
Re:Take your time, let software catch up. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, DfrgNtfs.exe is using 25% of my quad-core, and I'm not doing much else. I've gone well into 70% more more at times if I'm actually doing something intensive.
I'm using 7GB out of 8GB of RAM, and if I had 16GB I could probably put a hell of a dent in it too.
I don't even consider what I'm doing to be much of a load, and in the past I've been on machines where something literally was CPU bound for as much as an hour and I needed to walk away.
I don't even find it tough to use up that much resources ... hell, I stopped using Mozilla because it would expand to well over 1GB of RAM overnight (with the same # of windows and tabs that used to fit in 300MB).
I think the software has already caught up ... especially if you're like me and open something and leave it open.
Re:Long-time partner? Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:AMD = Stagnated. (Score:5, Interesting)
In 2011, Intel competes with itself.
That's part of the problem. One of the speculated reasons the Atom processor is so far behind, is that Intel was afraid it would cannibalize more profitable segments of its mobile CPU market. As a result, they launched it with a bunch of contractual restrictions on it (customers had to agree not to use it in any notebook larger than 10"-form factor), while using pricing models that discouraged 3rd party graphics (Atoms bundled with Intel's chipset were sometimes actually cheaper than solo Atoms, making nVidia ION combos uneconomical).
Since AMD had no strong CPUs in the netbook segment, everyone had to simply accept these restrictions at first, until AMD introduced their Ontaria and Zacate series.
Re:Take your time, let software catch up. (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. Too bad I already posted in the thread and can't mod you up anymore.
Nobody pays much attention to single-core performance anymore, and I have no idea why. There are tons of programs that people use on a regular basis that are single-core limited.
Intel has made only modest gains in performance-per-clock-cycle since the core 2 duo. AMD I'm pretty sure is actually going backwards if I am correctly remembering some of the bulldozer vs thurban reviews.
Looking at forthcoming offerings, AMD especially seems to be assuming that we're all constantly using our CPUs to run handbrake 24/7 or batch encode a couple hundred wavs to mp3 at a time, and thus would love 12 cores.
AMD APU graphics make big difference (Score:2, Interesting)
APU unlikely to fend off increasing competition from Intel? Most Intel Atom based netbooks/tablets/whatever that I know have the GMA 3150. Which runs at 200 Mhz max. and has 2 shader units. The C-50 has 80 unified shaders running at 280 Mhz (yes, again low but I'm guessing 80 things working in parallel make up for it. please correct me if I'm wrong), supporting DX11,OpenGL 4.1 and UVD 3. Way better than Intel graphics cards. True, the CPU isn't very fast, but for things like video playback and 2D,3D games and other applications? It beats Intel hands down. I love Intel for their linux support but they just don't make graphics hardware for gaming.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)