14 DAY TRIAL // At this point, we've written about the supposed state of TSMC's 28nm process so many times that we may as well see what those directly affected think of the matter.
Truth be told, we've already done this, as far as NVIDIA is concerned anyway, hence the general impression that TSMC is not doing as well as it should.
After all, if there were no shortages of 28nm chips (GPUs in this case), NVIDIA would not need to be looking for other manufacturers.
Still, there are parties who keep claiming that TSMC's 28nm chip yields are just fine, and Advanced Micro Devices might be one of them.
Based on the words of a company executive during the conference call with financial analysts, AMD has all the 28nm graphics processing units it needs.
“We were able to meet customer demand [for AMD Radeon HD 7000 "Southern Islands" chips made using 28nm fabrication process] in the first quarter,” said Thomas Seiffert, chief financial officer of AMD.
“The products are good, the demand is strong. We would like to have more access to the upside volume, but we have met pretty much all the demand in the first quarter.”
For those that need the lowdown of the situation, AMD uses the 28nm technology for its “Southern Islands” GPUs, powering the Radeon HD 7000 series.
Three in number, the SKUs are called Tahiti, Pitcairn and Cape Verde (codenames) and will be followed by three others this quarter (Q2, between April and June, 2012).
There will also be the dual-chip Radeon HD 7990, expected to battle NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 690. Alas, unlike in the latter's case, we have no availability details to impart.
In the eventuality that it was somehow missed, the ETA (estimated time of arrival) for the dual-Kepler has been uncovered just today (April 20). Given all this, AMD will probably hurry up with its own beast.