News 28nm process changes rumoured at TSMC

Rumour has it that TSMC was forced to halt 28nm production as it re-tools to meet unexpected demand.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2012/03/08/28nm-process-changes-tsmc/1

 

Lets just hope Keppler doesn't end up being a soft launch.

AMD have put a premium on its 7xxx series and a lot of people are relying on competition from Nvidia to drive prices down.

 

Didn't this exact same thing happen with the last process change?

You'd have thought they'd have learnt from their previous mistakes.

 

Of course they will deny it. Chinese (and Japanese) never say they fail on something. Its almost a religion.

 

Regarding AMD "dumping SOI"...

AMD doesn't use 28nm SOI (and has/had no plans to), so it should be obvious to any "analyst" that any APU/GPU shown as being manufactured at 28nm is going to be on bulk. AMDs roadmaps have shown that 28nm bulk being pushed upwards into the lower/middle Mainstream category, otherwise known as the "Llano/Trinity" successor "Kaveri".

This makes some sense for a number of reasons.
* For the lower-end APUs such as the Bobcats and the low/mid Llanos, there is little performance advantage to choosing SOI over bulk.
* SOI is expensive and the margins on these APUs are low. Better it is done on a cheaper process.
* SOI is sole-sourced from GF (or maybe IBM if AMD feels like flushing cash away and IBM is feeling charitable), while AMD can shop around a number of foundries to find best price/process/production capacity on 28nm bulk.
* I would imagine that AMD is feeling a bit capacity constrained on 32nm SOI with only the one of the modules at Fab 1 in Dresden producing 32nm wafers. With both the Bulldozer and Llano families currently on 32nm, they are competing for wafer starts.

The upper Mainstream and Performance level CPUs (note the CPU and not APU) are still shown as 32nm SOI through 2013 and it is likely that they will shrink to 22/20nm SOI. GF process roadmaps show 20nm SOI in late-2013/2014.

The AMD and SOI relationship isn't dead, just being kept for where there is a technical/performance need.
It is interesting to note that there is increasing talk that FD-SOI may be both cheaper and perform better than bulk below 20nm as well as being easier to produce.
Incredibly it seems that Intel may need to go FD-SOI for 14nm and below, so that Electronics Weekly article linked here that begins "Intel was right all along on SOI" may be complemented with another in a 2013 that starts "AMD was right all along on SOI".
We haven't seen the last of SOI, so less of the funeral talk, OK?

 

I thought that was covered by the "Chinese" part of his comment, unless the people of Taiwan are no longer Chinese? In this instance, political and geographical borders do not override racial or cultural traits.

 

I think perhaps many Taiwanese may object to being called Chinese... They have an unofficial independence and China doesn't as rigidly enforce any sovereignty like it does with other contested areas.

 

For now.

 

After reading all the news about them i begin to question their Top management ability, they keep scaling back and forth on their R&D etc..... they always over react and underestimate.