Moving into the next process of tech sooner than expected - will it be soon enough?
AMD has been tootling along on their 45nm architecture for quite some time now, and the Phenom II's show that they've got their process pretty much down pat . The only problem here is Intel - they've had 45nm going for so long that it's practically second nature to them, and later this year they're intending to move their process to 32nm.
Intel have kept to their Tick-Tock schedule for the time being, which basically means that one year will be an architecture change, and another year will be a process shrink - 2009 is a shrinking year. AMD hopes to match this one year later, getting their CPUs down to 32nm in mid 2010.
This is mostly due to the huge cash injection from the Abu Dhabi government, pumping cash into the company. Along with this AMD have also split off their manufacturing department into a separate entity, meaning that only the design and sales of the CPUs are their direct responsibility - something that makes a lot of sense when the economy is more up-and-down than a rollercoaster.
They won't have to focus on anything else but making their CPUs work, and their ATI team are surely working on the next GPU cores, so we hope this is going to be enough to keep AMD's head above water for the forseeable.
One thing we haven't heard from AMD for a little while is their next CPU architecture - they will need one to compete against Intel's Sandy Bridge that is also due out in late 2010. Softpedia have a little more on the 32nm production, and we'll definitely give you the heads-up on anything we hear from AMD in the near future.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012