AMD's roadmap for the coming years has made it clear that TSMC has been working hard not to offer Intel, where we have treated countless news about the 7nm lithographic and EUV process, also known as 7nm +.
If we focus on the "old" roadmap of Zen construction for CPUs, we should go into 2017 to see what AMD is expected to be in the year 2020, and that's when these surprises come.
TSMC looks not to sell wafers with EUV technology, offer issues or something else?
To give more light on this issue, it should be noted that the Taiwanese have three versions of their approach at 7nm, all divided into three different internal systems:
- N7 -> The original version and is currently marketed for 7nm and is still using the DUV (Deep Ultraviolet) process.
- N7P -> It's an upgraded and specific version made of the original, but it also uses DUV to get chip text.
- N7 + -> It's a real leap in lithography and eventually using EUV.
Here the debate begins, from now on on all AMD Zen 3 slides and until recently RDNA 2 was included on the 7nm + «on track» label.
Logically we thought that TSMC would come with solvency and that AMD would enjoy a much more advanced environment than Intel & # 39; s 10 nm, where it might be ahead of the facts.
But yesterday this passed like a house of cards and the slides showed only 7nm dry. What is the problem?
AMD does not specify which method should be used directly and compresses 7nm +
If this was not enough, AMD itself after the presentation tried to clarify the problem, but what it found was to create more debate and misunderstandings.
The explanation given to Anandtech is that they remove the "+" tag from their part of the road as it is likely that their next generation of 7nm products will use process improvements.
However, does not say
Obviously, even though Zen 3 will bring significant improvements to its design and increased performance it promises to be a few more steps forward, a more advanced and cheaper node to build like the N7 + would be a cake breaker and likely to hit Intel that they couldn't respond to.
So, if AMD does not present the N7 + with the said structure, it misses the opportunity to finish Intel late with a less-efficient node than it seemed, but that is certainly a bit tricky and will be a step ahead at 14 nm, because it also comes with shorter terms. with its 7 nm EUV.
