Pretty sure they did. Rome and Vega20 were confirmed TSMC 7nm, so the expectation was that AMD was going to use GF for everything else. Nothing else was officially confirmed of course. And as time wore on obviously everything was moved to TSMC.
I remember that in the Anandtech interview , where AMD's commented on the GloFo 7nm cancellation, they explicitly said they only had one product there, that was supposed to be released in the end of this year.
That would be my bet as well, considering the APU's are lagging the rest of the stack by about 1 product cycle at the moment.
I think that's probably a good guess. My understanding is that AMD worked closely with both TSMC and GF on the 7nm "big lift" (as well as with EDA tool vendors). TSMC beat GF on time-to-market (and perhaps on process specifications as well), so AMD committed to TSMC. Perhaps they initially committed only the 7nm CPU chiplet (does it have a code name by itself?), leaving the door open for GF to make "Renoir", the 7nm APU, if they could get ready on time. They probably failed to meet milestones on the latter, at which point AMD moved it to TSMC. Faced with no immediate 7nm product to make, GF threw the towel into the ring on 7nm altogether. Reportedly, AMD urged them to stay the course, perhaps dangling opportunities for Milan and beyond, but maybe they did not see any realistic prospect of catching up to TSMC.
Except we are definitely starting to see ARM in PCs. Samsung just announced their Snapdragon 8cx based Windows 10 laptop. Now and those (ARM laptops) may or may not take off but it's a start. That being said there has been x86 phone but anymore.
We've seen ARM in PCs before. Remember the Windows 8 machines with Tegra CPUs? It flopped, badly.
This is a fair point, but it's certainly getting more traction now (from the devs). Just look at the benchmarks here:
This news made the rounds. My guess is that, true to the APUs being a budget line for AMD so far, Renoir is primarily a 7nm shrink with some Zen 2 improvements. If nothing else it possibly being around 100mm² should offer nice battery improvements.
I’d be really surprised if the CCX complex wasn’t updated to Zen2. The higher throughput per clock would really give AMD a chance to compete with Intel in laptops.
Porting designs to 7nm is expensive. Why would AMD spend money porting Zen1 to 7nm when they can just use already ported Zen2? Vega is also already ported to 7nm - Radeon VII so they just need to put those two already made parts to same die.
Good news for Radeon VII owners (sort of) wrt longevity of the platform's driver support. Bad news for actual Renoir buyers.
Why?
Regarding the graphics block: depends, it looks like the current Navi is a precursor to what's actually getting used in the upcoming consoles, so an APU using the latter version once available wouldn't be the worst of all worlds.
I don't think they do. Just looking at epyc projections and ryzen sales, the io-dies should be enough.
There's plenty of market for 14nm Raven2 and 12nm Picasso. 7nm Renoir would be step above, probably 8c/16t. Renoir also might be the best gaming cpu from AMD, much better memory latencies than Matisse. Vega is fine, 7nm memory controller might allow very high memory clocks so it might be quite a bit faster than 14nm versions.
It's Vega instead of Navi. Navi is (overall) better.
Yes, but that won't be Renoir.
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