AMD's 20nm SoC adventure is over, the future is FinFET

Jul 8, 2015 13:32 GMT  ·  By

AMD apparently confirmed that it wouldn't be manufacturing any 20nm process technology at the largest Taiwan semiconductor foundry in the world, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.

The new FinFET tech will become a priority in AMD's semiconductor manufacturing process, but for now AMD won back $33 million (€30 million) in charge.

Apparently, AMD will plan to work more with ARM on its new system-on-chips processors code-named "Amur" having ARMv8-A cores and "Nolan" that features Puma + x86 cores that were announced in 2014. The new initiative was named "Project Skybridge" and was designed to integrate together with ARMv8 inside the same chipset, having the same graphics core, the same memory controller and I/O interfaces. The new System on Chip was designed primarily for tablets and low-cost/low-power laptops.

However, Lisa Su announced earlier this year that AMD cancelled all these plans as she hopes more profit will come from switching to FinFET production. As a result, the company wrote off the money it first invested in this deal with ARM and cancelled the tape-outs that would see the first AMD-ARM collaboration in the CPU industry.

AMD will invest everything in FinFET

Although it's unknown when the new 14nm FinFET chips will roll out from AMD, it's worth noting that it started taping out prototypes using the new foundry specification as early as 2013 so they won't be lagging too much behind.

Unfortunately, cancelling the "Amur” and “Nolan” means that AMD will have nothing new to offer for tablets based on Microsoft Corp.’s upcoming Windows 10 in the coming months.

According to KitGuru, TSMC wanted to design the 20nm manufacturing technology only for low-powered ARM-based application processors, and with AMD out of the picture, it will be difficult to continue developing the same SoC separately with ARM. The only partner that TSMC has right now on the 20nm SoC is Nvidia that will use it for the Tegra X1.