We were just discussing the other day, AMD's absence from TSMC's 16nm partners and the possibility that the Samsung-GloFo relationship might enable it to leave the foundry behind and use GloFo in its entirety. It seems like AMD has hinted at the same thing at the recently held Credit Suisse Technology Conference. Unless the guy presenting was discussing something completely different, this signals a paradigm shift from AMD.
Cut dies showcased in TSMC - AMD's fab of choice for high power ASICs, until of recent @Stock TSMC
Advancing the process from 28nm is the responsibility of Global Foundries since it makes all our products - AMD
Remember the very huge hint I was talking about in my last article? well this is it. There is not a single mention of TSMC or any of its wafer contracts throughout the entire proceedings and this is strange in itself because the publicly available contracts of GloFo are not diverse enough to substitute for TSMC. Now mentions of GlobalFoundries are scattered throughout the text but here is one specifically interesting snippet from the transcript (link given below) which implies that AMD will be using Global Foundries for its FinFET products.
Q: .......what do you think about your roadmap of getting the FinFET and moving down Moore's Law and the expense of doing so?
A: AMD has been absent because we are a fabless company. And typically fabless companies are not the ones that have to worry about the process technologies. I think that's for the GlobalFoundries to go ahead and figure out. And GlobalFoundries did something very interesting, the alliance with Samsung, I think that's going to help both Samsung and GlobalFoundries and us from an overall standpoint because it makes FinFET available to a broader set of customers in the industry as opposed we have one or 2 players that go ahead and have the technology.
Here's another one:
........So from an overall standpoint, today the bulk of our products are 28 nanometers. We will have certain products in 20 nanometers and then we'll go to FinFET from there, but our partnership with GlobalFoundries is where it comes into play in terms of what's the right point to go and intersect products with technology and introduce the parts out in the market.- Devinder Kumar - SVP and CFO AMD
Mr. Kumar then further went on to state that Global Foundries has improved significantly and that AMD expects 50% of its revenue to come from non-PC non-traditional sector by the end of 2015. It looks like AMD's WSA (Wafer Supply Agreement) with GloFo is getting more and more diverse and that the partnership with Samsung is helping a lot. AMD mentioned the alliance of GloFo with Samsung as a critical milestone that could help the foundry progress exponentially. So far, Samsung is helping AMD on the 14nm FinFET process which is not yet mature for high performance ASIC production. I won't go into any more detail because we already bordering dangerously close to blind speculation. So there you go folks, the winds of change appear to be rising at our beloved Red Camp.
A full copy of the transcript can be found at SeekingAlpha.com
