14 DAY TRIAL // Despite all the problems than AMD has encountered with TSMC along the line (remember that HD 5850 and HD 5870 shortages that plagued AMD's graphics cards more than a year ago) the company seems to have no other option as to go with the Taiwanese manufacturer for building their future 28nm Krishna and Wichita APUs.
This latest news comes as somewhat of a shocker since GlobalFoudries had previously announced they have made great strides when it comes down to 28-nm bulk manufacturing, many of us expecting that AMD would go with GloFo for producing their next generation 28nm processors.
However, this no longer seems to be the case since Cnes has just announced that AMD will outsource the production of its 28nm Krishna and Wichita APUs to TSMC, these chips being designed in order to replace Ontario and Zacate sometime in 2012.
Aimed at the tablet market, the Krishna and Wichita APUs will come in one to four Bobcat core configurations, while also adding an integrated DirectX 11 graphics processing unit and USB 3.0 support.
Other informations regarding these future low-power APUs are not known at this time, but considering these are based on the same Bobcat core as Ontario and Zacate, they won't probably bring any major architectural changes apart from the increased number of CPU cores (which is not entirely a bad thing considering how well these chips actually shape up).
This latest development however, won't affect the AMD's plans regarding the 32nm Llano processor that is still going to be produced by AMD's spin-off sometime next year.
In addition to the Krishna and Wichita chips, TSMC is also building for AMD the Ontario and Zacate accelerated processing units (APUs) as well as the Northern Island family of graphics chips (Barts-coded Radeon HD 6850/6870 and Cayman-coded Radeon HD 6950/6970 GPUs), all of these using the 40nm manufacturing process. (via The Tech Report)