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haxxiy on 28 June 2017
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Pemalite said:
haxxiy said:

I do assume there will be an improved Zen on 14 nm next year, with improved memory compatibility and higher clock speeds. Since their 7 nm architecture has been renamed Zen 2, AMD might choose to call this improved design Zen+. But I don't think AMD has the money to redesign their chips intended for 7 nm back to 14 nm, like Nvidia did with Maxwell. As for 12 nm... it seems even less likely since it's a node without Finfets, that would probably be even harder to redesign their Zen chips around. It will be worth the wait for the 7 nm node even if it is months late, the front end of line is bound to be much denser than Intel's 14 nm. It will be close to Intel's 10 nm than GloFo's 14 nm was to Intel's 14 nm.

 

Retooling chip designs for older processes is something AMD has done before.
For instance VLIW4 existed purely because 28nm wasn't ready, so they pushed their design on 40nm hard instead.

As for 12nm, I did say there was "Caveats".
It's also not a true 12nm process anyway. Neither is TSMC's 12nm process that nVidia is using for GV100.

Interesting, I didn't know about that. I guess there's a chance, then, albeit a small one.

I wonder what is behind the pseudo 12 nm process. I guess the 20 nm one, back from 2014? It was the latest one without FinFets.

We know 22 nm FDX is a slightly denser 28 nm, so probably the 12 nm follows the same path, just with a more outrageous naming.