Posted on Monday, October 25 2010 @ 15:23 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
AMD's Matt Skynner, corporate VP and general manager of the firm's GPU division,
confirmed to Bit Tech that the Radeon HD 6000 series should have been 32nm, but that it had to be made on 40nm as TSMC decided to drop 32nm in favor of concentrating on 28nm. Bit Tech also got the feeling that TSMC's 28nm has been pushed back towards the middle of 2011, although this was not directly confirmed by Skynner.
We asked if these new graphics cards launched too early, instead of late this year/next year when TSMC's 28nm process was ready.
Mr Skynner admitted that the HD 6000 series was originally set to use TSMC's 32nm process, but that AMD had to opt back to 40nm earlier this year after that process was unceremoniously dumped by TSMC in favour of concentrating on 28nm only. Excluding the yield issues with the more recent 40nm process, TSMC does have great experience in creating high performance, low power half-node processes suitable for GPUs at 110nm, 80nm and 55nm, and this is where 28nm looks to continue.
