When will we see Pirate Island?

This may have come as a bit of a surprise to you, especially seeing all the pirate island leaks over the past months, but up until now AMD have kept quiet about their pirate island GPUs and have not given away anything as to their release or whether the next-gen GPUs will utilize smaller node, but now one thing is clear and that is – We will not AMD GPUs based on the 20nm fabrication process this year.

Lisa Su– SVP and General Manager of Global Business Units

So in terms of product and technology selection, certainly we need to be at the leading-edge of the technology road-map. So what we’ve said in the past is certainly this year all of our products are in 28-nanometer across both, you know, graphics client and our semi-custom business. We are, you know, actively in the design phase for 20-nanometer and that will come to production. And then clearly we’ll go to FinFET. So that would be the progression of it.

Lisa Su– SVP and General Manager of Global Business Units

So in terms of product and technology selection, certainly we need to be at the leading-edge of the technology roadmap. So what we’ve said in the past is certainly this year all of our products are in 28-nanometer across both, you know, graphics client and our semi-custom business. We are, you know, actively in the design phase for 20-nanometer and that will come to production. And then clearly we’ll go to FinFET. So that would be the progression of it.

So what Lisa Su is trying to say is the 28-nonometer fabricated video cards are sufficient for this years tech, they don’t want to be the first out of the gates and they will not be releasing 20nm graphics processing units this year, however they are in the process of designing the 20nm architecture that will power next generation GPUs, after that they will move to on FinFET 16nm.

Where does this leave Nvidia?

This possible leaves the doors open for them to come in ,steal the lime light and push out 20nm first but what are the chances of that happening?

With rumors at the beginning of April that Nvidia’s 20nm Maxwell GPUs were being delayed until 2015, I cant really see that being an issue, however that does not mean they won’t change their minds and push them out early, only time can tell.