It is taking a different path than NVIDIA, that's for sure

Nov 4, 2014 09:28 GMT  ·  By

AMD has had to readjust its semiconductor plans this year, after its primary provider of chips proved unable to advance in terms of fabrication tech on schedule. The look of the new roadmap might come across as pretty odd though.

According to a leaked slide, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is almost ready to finally begin production of 20nm silicon.

This means that all those juicy 20nm next-generation graphics processing units could finally reach the market. That's where we hit a snag though.

While NVIDIA is expected to immediately move on to 20 nm-based Maxwell graphics processing units (though official word on the matter is still slow in coming), Advanced Micro Devices is not going to do that.

At least not right away. From what we can gather, AMD fully expects TSMC to have trouble starting 20nm production full tilt, so it's pacing its product advancements.

AMD will shrink game console chips first

AMD is in the more or less unique position of providing the processors for the most popular game consoles sold around the world: Microsoft Xbox One and Sony PlayStation 4.

Jaguar architecture-based cores combined with Radeon-level graphics easily run all your favorite titles. However, there's still a significant video quality difference between what's supported on consoles and what PCs can pull off.

In the interest of narrowing that gap faster, AMD is going to make its console chips better, and moving to 20nm fabrication technology is the next step.

The SoCs will, thus, be the first of its products (GPUs and APUs included) that will benefit from TSMC's 20nm order allocation first.

The new 20nm Xbox One SoC will have the following specs in a tinier physical size, or something better: eight 64-bit x86 cores, 5 billion transistors, a GPU with 768 stream processors (Graphcis CoreNext architecture), 48 MB on-die cache, and quad-channel DDR3 RAM support.

AMD's current PlayStation 4 has the same GPU but with 1,152 SPs, a 256-bit GDDR5 memory interface wired to 8 GB GDDR5.

The ETA for the launch of the new chips

We'll likely see them in early 2015 or thereabouts. Microsoft and Sony will no doubt lobby for a quick transition since, better performance aside, the lower manufacturing costs and higher energy efficiency will help them save costs on other components, like cooling and power.

AMD's immediate 20nm plans revealed
AMD's immediate 20nm plans revealed

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AMD advances PlayStation and Xbox One SoCs to 20nm
AMD's immediate 20nm plans revealed
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