AMD's 28nm Brazos successor to be manufactured at TSMC

[siopao1984]

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AMD's 28nm Brazos successor to be manufactured at TSMC by VR-Zone.com



With the Krishna/Wichita APUs now canceled, ExtremeTech has shed some light into AMD's strategy. The Deccan platform APUs were indeed planned for fabrication at GlobalFoundries, unlike Brazos which is manufactured by TSMC. Anticipating problems with the move to gate-first with GlobalFoundries, AMD canceled the Krishna and Wichita APUs and the entire Deccan platform. The short term solution is Brazos 2.0 - nothing but a minor tweak of Brazos. Long term, AMD is planning to move back to TSMC for its power efficient APUs.

Brazos 2.0 will have to hold fort till a direct 28nm shrink of Brazos is now expected some time in 2012 - well after the release of Intel's 32nm Atom and 28nm ARM SoCs. The true successor to Brazos 2.0 - presumably an enhanced version of Krishna and Wichita featuring upto 4 cores, if not Kabini/Samara - is at least 18 months away, according to ExtremeTech.

In the mainstream APU segment, the successor to Trinity - Kaveri - is scheduled for 2013 on GloFo's 28nm.

Source: ExtremeTech

[SantosJB]

this smells trouble for AMD. Just modifying Brazos may not be enough. Intel will be launching their new product line on 28nm while AMD is stucked with 40nm.