AMD to use multiple foundries for 7nm chips

One last snippet from the Credit Suisse Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference before we call it a night. Credit Suisse analyst John Pitzer asked AMD CEO Lisa Su about the implications of the latest wafer supply agreement amendment with GlobalFoundries. Su commented about how the new agreement gives AMD more flexibility, and how they've ramped a large number of chips on both the 16FF process from TSMC and the 14LPP process from GlobalFoundries. Looking into the future, Su says AMD will source 7nm chips from not only GlobalFoundries but also other foundry suppliers:

Lisa Su
Yes, so -- and so as you said, GlobalFoundries is a very important partner for us. We have a long term wafer supply agreement. But what I was trying to do with this renegotiation is really give us an opportunity to have a very clear long term access to high performance technology and more flexibility from a technology roadmap standpoint. So, one of the knocks on AMD perhaps has been we’ve had some execution issues that have passed. I am extremely focused on execution and how do we ensure that we have strong execution. And so the wafer supply agreement gives us some additional flexibility as it relates to future technologies.

And in particular, this year we ramped actually a large number of chips in both 16FF with TSMC and 14LPP with GlobalFoundries. It was a large undertaking. And having two suppliers actually was helpful, frankly, because we’ve turned over the majority of our product line into FinFET over the last seven or eight months. As we look forward, we believe that 7 nanometer technology generation is going to be very critical, it's going to be a big node, whereas 10 is probably going to be a smaller node. And so the wafer supply agreements, we will certainly work very closely with GlobalFoundries, but we’ll also work with other foundry suppliers for 7 nanometer.