AMD Confirms Completing Two 14/16nm FinFET Product Designs - FinFET Based Zen CPUs And Arctic Islands GPUs Due In 2022

AMD's President and CEO, Lisa Su, revealed at yesterday'due south earnings call that AMD has already completed its first couple of FinFET designs. She also stressed that FinFET is going to be incredibly important across all markets for the company in 2022.

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Although Su stressed the importance of good design and architecture in making whatsoever competitive product every bit opposed to just manufacturing procedure. Being on a competitive leading edge process node is undoubtedly important but it's but a tool. And what the engineers manage to create with that tool in terms of products and innovation is what's going to affair.

AMD Confirms Completing Two 14/16nm FinFET Product Designs - Volition Debut Zen CPUs And Arctic Islands GPUs In 2022

Due to obvious competitive reasons Su did not reveal which products taped out on FinFET. All the same Su confirmed that AMD's adjacent generation processors based on Zen too as the company'southward upcoming adjacent generation graphics products - purportedly code named Chill Islands - are both based on FinFET and are coming out next yr. So information technology'south fair to assume that at least one of the 2 completed designs is Zen while the other is likely a next generation graphics production fix for 2022.

We covered yesterday the irksome down of the historic manufacturing process transition cadency as we've come up to know it in the ascertainment that is Moore'due south Constabulary. Intel's traditional tick-tock cadency has been augmented to have into account this slow down of recent years. 14nm has been challenging for the company and the remainder of the manufacture and 10nm will keep to evidence to exist challenging. Equally a result Intel delayed their 10nm Cannonlake family unit of processors by a twelvemonth to 2022. And instead will be introducing Kaby Lake as a stop-gap 14nm solution for 2022.

This creates a very interesting dynamic which analysts caught on very quickly. Because information technology means that for the first fourth dimension in about a decade AMD and Intel will really have close parity in terms of manufacturing procedure technology. And will meet for the first time next year with AMD'south launch of its FinFET based Zen CPUs in a similar time-frame to Intel's Kaby Lake in 2022.

Matt Ramsay - Canaccord Genuity - Analyst
A lilliputian bit of a longer-term strategic question for you, Lisa. Last dark, Intel announced the improver of a new chip on their 14-nanometer roadmap and pushed back 10. Information technology strikes me as two things. One, dearest to get your commentary relative to your foundry partners as to how the [Moore'south Law] progression is going, particularly with Zen coming on 14-nanometer next year. 2d, it looks similar now yous will be in a position to potentially overlap your Zen products with a generation of Intel products that is still on 14-nanometer. Just your reaction to that, in general, and the competitive landscape on the foundry side. Thanks.

Lisa Su - Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. - President & CEO
Matt, I do recall the process technology landscape, right now, is quite interesting. On the get-go part of your question, how do we view FinFET technologies? Actually, I think the maturity of FinFET technologies is coming along very nicely, so we see it as an important office of our roadmap in 2022 across all of our markets. Nosotros've really merely taped out our showtime couple of FinFET designs. Relative to what that means for the competitive mural going forward, I've been asked that question a couple of times over the last yr and my comments accept been, our focus is on blueprint compages and ensuring that nosotros use all of our design architecture expertise. Zen is a make clean sheet pattern and from architectural standpoint, I think it's going to be very competitive. The fact that the gap betwixt foundry technologies and other technologies is shrinking, I think does change the competitive mural and volition be a adept opportunity as we become forward competitively. We are aggressively going after FinFET and I think that's going to be an incredibly of import node for us.

AMD seems to exist quite confident that Zen is architecturally competitive regardless of the process node. Earlier this year in May we defenseless a glimpse for the first time into what Zen will bring to the tabular array in 2022. We know Zen will debut on the desktop start on a new socket dubbed AM4 featuring a make new chipset with DDR4 memory support. We also know that the Zen FX processors themselves volition feature high core counts, multi-threading and a xl% IPC - instructions per clock - improvement over AMD's Excavator CPU core. So no doubt it has all the makings of a competitive product.

It looks particularly promising because that Zen will be on a comparable process node to Intel's Kaby Lake adjacent twelvemonth and that Zen will bring high cadre count CPUs to the mainstream. Something that Intel still reserves for the more expensive LGA2011-3 enthusiast platform and volition withal be limited to Broadwell-E next year. The x86 CPU market has been in a state of chronic stagnation and an aggressive injection of contest may catch Intel by surprise. A good change of pace is needed and AMD seems to exist heading in the right direction with Zen.