AMD hints at Pirate Islands GPUs made on the 28nm Node - 20nm APUs a Possibility

AMD recently presented at the Credit Suisse Engineering science Briefing and though they did not reveal anything specific or concrete, some very interesting hints and implications were dropped by them. I volition become over the interesting portions in this article and maybe one more. The get-go thing, that AMD has done is imply heavily that the upcoming Fiji GPU will be on the 28nm Node and then mentioned that they volition switch direct to FinFETs from there.

AMD Feature Cover Not an official slide. @AMD Public @Wccftech

AMD will be transitioning direct to FinFETs from 28nm - Pirate Islands are probably on 28nm

Almost of the transcript (link given at the end) featured your usual direction rhetoric, but gems such as these can be establish hidden inside the jargon. The question of the 20nm process has been on the lips of many ever since 20nm outset entered volume product some months ago. However, later on months passed and still no mention of 20nm GPUs ever came to light, we began to wonder simply what was going on. Recently, our sentiment is mostly tilted towards the fact that the Industry is making up for lost footing past abandoning the 20nm process and moving straight to 16nm FinFETs instead. Before nosotros go whatever further here is the relevant quote from AMD:

....from an overall standpoint, today the bulk of our products are 28 nanometers. We will take sure products in 20 nanometers and then we'll become to FinFET from there, simply our partnership with GlobalFoundries is where information technology comes into play in terms of what'due south the right point to go and intersect products with technology and innovate the parts out in the market.

Now Mr. Devinder Kumar mentions that the majority of our [AMD's] offerings are on 28nm and that this bulk will transition straight to FinFET.I don't know about you but AMD's GPU lineup does make upward a very significant portion of its offerings. If you put bated GPUs, what remains are old CPUs, the APUs in the consoles (which only counts as two offerings really) and APUs in general. Unless AMD plans to rebrand its old GPUs into the R9 300 Series with only the ane flagship on 20nm (which is unlikely), AMD is hinting at Pirate Islands on the 28nm Node. We have already run the numbers based on initial leaks and found that the performance jump shown is very much possible on 28nm and inside the 600mm^2 die limit of TSMC.

Ofcourse, the above is mostly just educated speculation on my part and information technology could be that Mr. Devinder was talking about the Pirate Isle GPUs themselves. Still, in my mind the chances of Carrizo APU being on the 20nm process are exponentially college than Pirate Islands on the same. 28nm to 16nm FF+ makes perfect sense and you might call up that Nvidia was also recently listed at TSMC'due south partners for 16nm (although in that location was no sign of AMD). I have the mother of all hints from AMD in that regard, but I will cover it in the next writeup which should be up in a few minutes as well.