14 DAY TRIAL // The rumor mill must want to totally throw us off balance now, at the closing of the year. Why else would reports start to contradict pretty much everything we thought we knew about NVIDIA's and AMD's roadmaps?
Admittedly, neither company ever officially endorsed any report, so we are, in the end, fully responsible for which of them we believe and why.
But there was a pretty strong momentum behind the likely paths that their graphics processing units were going to take from this point onwards.
Then again, learning that AMD and NVIDIA (more AMD than NVIDIA) had essentially killed one of the major reasons for their rivalry might have caused the world to set their imagination a bit too loose.
What the world knows right now
AMD has dropped Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and has enlisted Globalfoundries to make all its chips from here on out. That includes CPUs, GPUs, APUs, and SoCs.
NVIDIA has, meanwhile, stuck with TSMC for its GPUs and SoCs, which means it will go from 28nm to 16nm directly, whenever that happens.
What the world believes right now
AMD is expected to move from 28nm to 20nm at some point in May 2015, or at least begin sampling of GPUs, APUs and/or CPUs based on it.
Meanwhile, NVIDIA is set to stuck to the 28nm technology all the way until 2016, when it will finally go to 16nm, probably when it releases Pascal.
What will really happen, according to a new report
We're not ready to believe everything that BitsandChips.it is saying, since AMD must be tired of putting off the fabrication tech node advancement by now.
However, if NVIDIA really does plan to stay at 28nm until two years from now, AMD wouldn't have much to lose by doing the same, so it behooves us to at least report the matter.
And the rumor is this: instead of 20nm, AMD will have Globalfoundries produce its chips on the 28nm SHP process, where SHP stands for super high-performance.
The process will supposedly let AMD lower voltages and, by extension, increase core speeds of its GPUs (likely Graphics CoreNext 1.2 architecture), since lower voltages mean less heat generated.
The bottom line
The bottom line is that now we can't be sure of anything in regards to GPU roadmaps anymore. Hopefully, Advanced Micro Devices (and maybe NVIDIA too) will clarify or debunk at least some of these rumors. They have really started to pile up.