Globalfoundries confirmed today that they have successfully qualified the 14LPP process and delivered working 14nm product samples to AMD. Both companies confirmed via a release issued to the press today that AMD will be introducing CPU, APU and GPU products next year based on Globalfoundries' "most advanced 14nm FinFET process technology" dubbed 14LPP.



AMD confirmed that it will leverage the considerable performance, power efficiency and significant die size reduction enabled by Globalfoundries' 14LPP process into CPUs, APUs and graphics products spanning personal computers, data centers and immersive computing devices.

Santa Clara, Calif., November 5, 2015 -- GLOBALFOUNDRIES today announced it has demonstrated silicon success on the first AMD ( NASDAQ:AMD ) products using GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ most advanced 14nm FinFET process technology. As a result of this milestone, GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ silicon-proven technology is planned to be integrated into multiple AMD products that address the growing need for high-performance, power-efficient compute and graphics technologies across a broad set of applications, from personal computers to data centers to immersive computing devices.

14nm AMD CPU, APU & GPU Production Samples Delivered, Going Through Validation

We exclusively reported two weeks ago that AMD had successfully completed the design of several "Arctic Islands" R 400 series GPUs which have been taped out and will enter mass production next year. AMD had also officially confirmed that it will be updating its entire graphics line-up with next generation graphics products based on advanced FinFET process technology in the coming quarters.

On the CPU side we've managed to confirm that both of AMD's next generation high performance x86 and ARM64bit CPU cores, code named "Zen" and "K12" have also successfully completed the design phase and reached tape out and are on track for availability next year and in 2017 respectively. Only five days ago we have also heard a whisper about AMD's hotly anticipated Zen CPU core meeting "all expectation" in testing with no "significant bottlenecks" being found.

Globalfoundries' and AMD's joint announcement today affirms all what we've been hearing over the past several weeks and months. The announcement also goes hand in hand with what I had said in my op-ed back in September about Globalfoundries' 14LPP process being on time for AMD's next generation Zen based products.

AMD has taped out multiple products using GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ 14nm Low Power Plus (14LPP) process technology and is currently conducting validation work on 14LPP production samples. GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ 14LPP FinFET is ramping with production-ready yields and excellent model-to-hardware correlation at its Fab 8 facility in New York. In January, the early-access version of the technology (14LPE) was successfully qualified for volume production, while achieving yield targets on lead customer products. The performance-enhanced version of the technology (14LPP) was qualified in the third quarter of 2015, with the early ramp occurring in the fourth quarter of 2015 and full-scale production set for 2016.

According to the joint announcement today, 14LPP is in excellent shape. With yields already hitting "production-ready" thresholds. Meaning that the only thing left for 14LPP to enter volume production is for total capacity to meet demand. Which should occur sometime in 2016 as the process continues its ramp-up, which has been kicked off in Q4 of this year.

14LPE is the early access “low power” version of the common Samsung/Globalfoudnries 14nm FinFET process. While 14LPP is the second generation, high performance variant that is set to succeed 14LPE. Despite its name, 14LPP should deliver better performance as well as lower power consumption, the only caveat being its later availability. 14nm FinFET will offer engineers nearly double transistors to play with in the same area as the current 28nm process. 14nm FinFET also has significantly faster switching speeds, which will translate to significantly higher clock speeds compared to current 28nm based GPUs. This is all in addition to the drastic power savings enabled by the smaller feature sizes and the move from planar to FinFET gates.

14nm FinFET Technology 14LPE – Early time-to-market version with area and power benefits for mobility applications

14LPP – Enhanced version with higher performance and lower power; a full platform offering with MPW, IP enablement and wide application coverage

Today’s announcement represents another significant milestone towards reaching full production readiness of GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ 14LPP process technology, which will reach high-volume production in 2016. The 14LPP platform taps the benefits of three-dimensional, fully-depleted FinFET transistors to enable customers like AMD to deliver more processing power in a smaller footprint for applications that demand the ultimate in performance.

Mark Papermaster, senior vice president and chief technology officer at AMD :



FinFET technology is expected to play a critical foundational role across multiple AMD product lines, starting in 2016, GLOBALFOUNDRIES has worked tirelessly to reach this key milestone on its 14LPP process. We look forward to GLOBALFOUNDRIES' continued progress towards full production readiness and expect to leverage the advanced 14LPP process technology across a broad set of our CPU, APU, and GPU products.

AMD's chief technology officer, Mark Papermaster, confirmed that AMD will in fact be leveraging the 14LPP process for CPU, APU and GPU products. This official confirmation is a very interesting development as AMD is also a confirmed partner of TSMC's for its 16FF process. The very same process that Nvidia had officially confirmed earlier in the year that it will be using for its next generation Pascal GPUs in 2016. From a historical point view, every single AMD graphics product debut on a next generation manufacturing process was delivered on a TSMC process node. With official confirmations of AMD building FinFET GPUs at both TSMC and Globalfoundries next year it's going to be a fascinating spectacle to see which GPUs would debut on which process and why AMD decided to go against its tradition and partner with both foundries for its next generation Arctic Islands GPUs.

Mike Cadigan, senior vice president of product management at GLOBALFOUNDRIES :

