Krishna and Wichita 28nm won’t make it to TSMC
Written by Fuad Abazovic
GloFo 28nm chips cancelled, official
It takes twelve to eighteen months to redesign a chip from one fab to another, a senior industry insider shared.
Krishna and Wichita have been in design for a long time, probably close to two years now, and the news that they will get cancelled disturbed quite a lot of people. It turns out that Globalfoundries simply comes with 28nm too late to make the difference, and AMD wants to use its manpower for something else.
In order to redesign Krishna and Wichita to manufacture them at TSMC, it would take some twelve to eighteen months, again being way too late to make the difference. Bear in mind that Intel has new Atoms scheduled for 2013, now in 22nm and E series chips have to compete with that.
If AMD would switch from GloFo to TSMC and if they already did that let’s say in September, you probably would not see these chips out before the end of 2012, perhaps even later. By the time AMD would have enough of them to market, Intel would come out with its 22nm parts, rendering them obsolete at launch. On the other hand, waiting for GloFo to ready its 28nm process would give the new chips a pretty short shelf life, since they would be replaced in a matter of months, which is not something OEMs are crazy about.
AMD is set to release its new roadmaps during an analyst conference scheduled for February 2012, so I guess this will be the time to learn about the big changes that Rory plans to make. Let’s hope he knows what he is doing.
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