AMD Is Getting Ready to Overtake Intel With 7-Nanometer CPUs and Graphics Cards
AMD has been catching up to rival these past few years, and recently, the chip maker may have finally overtaken Intel. AMD announced to investors that they are getting ready to test 7-nanometer processors in time for a launch in 2019, along with a line of video cards that use Vega-based technology as well.
Meantime, Intel is telling their investors that their 10-nanometer Cannon Lake chips would not even be ready until next year, at which point, they'll be way behind AMD, as Engadget pointed out.
AMD has just also launched the second generation of its Ryzen chips, and at this stage, the company has already refined its technology down to a 12-nanometer tech with 14-nanometer elements mixed in. The new Zen 2 coming out next year, based on 7-nanometer tech, then represents a huge leap in performance and power savings that AMD will be the first to put out.
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The new chips that are likely to come next year will reportedly use a bleeding edge lithography technology based on extreme ultraviolet photo-etching techniques, meaning AMD is already preparing to move off visible light.
"So our foundry strategy is to use both TSMC and GLOBALFOUNDRIES on the first 7-nanometer product. We are using TSMC for that product and we have a very strong relationship with them," AMD Chief Lisa Su explained in a meeting with investors, as quoted by Seeking Alpha.
"And so, we do see a good momentum on it from what we see, and I'm not concerned about capacity," she added.
This new development will put an even greater pressure on Intel, which has already announced a delay for its 10-nanometer Cannon Lake CPUs yet again. This time, the company is having trouble getting enough yields for mass production, although Intel has already started delivering tiny volumes of the chips.
Intel is now saying that they are shifting the bulk of production of their new CPUs to next year, at just the time when 7-nanometer chips from AMD are now expected to come out. The company "now expects 10-nanometer volume production to shift to 2019 [rather than the end of 2018]."
Meanwhile over at AMD, some leaked presentation materials already show the new Vega graphics tech about to double the bandwidth of current video cards. The company itself has not yet announced 7-nanometer tech making it to their new Vega models, but it's more or less expected that the company will put them into its gaming cards sooner rather than later.
For now, the company is "Sampling" the next generation of Zen 2 processors, built with 7-nanometer technology, in its labs to prepare for what should be a huge 2019 for the company. AMD is testing a Radeon Instinct machine learning graphics cards that use 7-nanometer Vega-based technology as well.
