Globalfoundries to Make AMD's 28nm GPUs

With all the problems that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has been having, both Advanced Micro Devices and NVIDIA saw for themselves how having just one supplier of graphics chips can backfire. AMD, however, may be able to permanently resolve this issue faster than its rival, because it has a special ace up its sleeve. Specifically, AMD practically has its own foundry and, according to recent reports, is thinking of switching to it starting 2011.

AMD has been using Globalfoundries' manufacturing processes for years. In fact, Globalfounfries has been making practically all of the Sunnyvale, California-based company's central processing units, including the popular Phenom series. Considering that the foundry plans to move to the 28nm HKMG (High-K metal gate) process by next year (having canceled its 32nm node), it makes sense for ATI to call upon its services for the making of its graphics processing units.

“The first intersection of our AMD GPUs and Globalfoundries are on the 28nm. We haven’t been public with respect to any timing there,” said Dirk Meyer, chief executive officer of AMD, during a quarterly conference call with financial analysts, according to a report published by X-bit Labs.

The factory's 28nm manufacturing process technology will be available in two variants. The 28nm-SLP, short for Super Low Power, will be optimized for wireless mobile applications and handheld devices, where a long battery life is necessary. The second version, aptly dubbed 28nm-HP (High performance), will be used for the making of game consoles, storage, networking, media encoding and, of course, graphics solutions.

Depending on how soon ATI starts calling upon either variant, 28nm GPU-based graphics cards should show up sometime next year. This may suggest that the so-called Northern Islands family of GPUs will be based on this technology, seeing how they are also slated to make an appearance in 2011.