AMD says subset of its products will go 12nm in 2018

Last month AMD CTO Mark Papermaster revealed the company will be adopting GlboalFoundries' 12nm LP node in 2018. During yesterday's earnings call with financial analysts, AMD CEO Lisa Su talked about nodes and said that while 7nm is the big one, a subset of AMD's products will transition to 12nm in 2018.

Su says the enhanced version of GlobalFoundries' 14nm process will boost the performance of the client and graphics roadmap:

Dr. Lisa T. Su - Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.

Yeah, absolutely, Matt. So 7-nanometer, we've talked about is a very important node for us and it's an important node for the industry. It's a major node. So we have a lot of engineering resources on that. And you should expect that that will be across all of our businesses. And we're actively working on those products now. We do see an opportunity with 12-nanometer. 12-nanometer is a relatively small engineering lift. And I would view it as a performance enhancement to our current road map.

And so we are working on taking some of our products, I would say, a subset of our products into 12-nanometer in 2018 to augment the performance of our client and graphics road map. But I see – the significant resources are on 7-nanometer, and that's progressing well. We're overall pleased with how the performance on that is looking. And then, we will opportunistically look at some products to go into 12-nanometer as it makes sense for the road map.

Asked about a timeline for the 7nm products, AMD CEO Lisa Su refused to share any specifics as there's still a lot of R&D to be done.