Today, TSMC announced that it has successfully entered volume production at its 28nm node.
As always, expect the usual improvements in energy efficiency to come from chips produced with this process; TSMC has successfully moved its High Performance (HP), High Performance Low Power (HPL) and Low Power (LP) technologies to 28nm, making it viable for a wide range of applications. High Performance Mobile Computing (HPM) will be in volume production by the end of the year.
What’s important about today’s announcement is that TSMC claims it has twice the number production tape-outs than it did at the same time back when it introduced 40nm production, thanks to working closer with its customers.
NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm and Altera applauded the success of TSMC and confirmed their continued involvement with 28nm production.
NVIDIA’s Jeff Fisher, Senior Vice President, GeForce Business Unit:
“NVIDIA and TSMC have a history of delivering the most complex GPU architectures on state-of-the-art process nodes. This partnership has been among the industry’s most prolific, resulting in more than one billion GPUs shipped. Our close collaboration in developing 28nm processors will once again deliver the most energy-efficient GPUs and highest-performance graphics processors on the market,”
AMD’s Matt Skynner, Corporate Vice President and General Manager, GPU Division:
"We applaud TSMC’s success bringing a robust 28nm process to market, and we look forward to leveraging the benefits of this new process when we ship our next-generation discrete graphics products … The combination of AMD’s industry-leading graphics IP and TSMC’s manufacturing prowess will enable the next big leap in graphics performance with the parallel compute horsepower and power efficiency designed to meet the needs of even the most demanding gamer.”
With TSMC being the first to reach 28nm volume production, certainly this writer wonders where GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ future may lie, especially in relation to any chances of future production on behalf of AMD.
