Earlier this year AMD announced that they are working on TSMC’s 7nm FinFET process under their VEGA series of GPUs and will be the first mass producer of silicon to boast the 7nm process.
The current race of packing more transistors on the same quantity of silicon die or less is leading by AMD, as it is all set to release the 7nm products for the consumer market in 2019. We still do not know how the new architecture will compare to the Intel’s Coffee lake offering that is supposed to be made using the 10nm process according to Intel’s roadmap.
The reason why AMD is heading above Intel is that Intel was supposed to release the 10nm coffee lake processors in 2016, but due to massive delays, it is still at 14nm process.
On the other hand, AMD is going according to its roadmap, they have already released the 2nd generation of zen architecture called zen+ and considering how well it improved to the existing zen architecture it can be safely said that they will be able to make the 7nm processors before the competition.
We all know the 28-core disaster that Intel had to show during CES 2018 when AMD was all set to release the 32-core Threadripper 2. However, the lead is only in the enterprise market Intel has been dominating the consumer market for years and the new 7nm processors can turn out to be the only chance AMD has to grab its lead.
AMD has already debuted the 7nm process when it announced the “Rome” Epyc series processors that had a unique combination of 14nm I/O die and the 7nm “chiplets”, making cores like this and then joining them using the infinity thread provided higher yields and less latency among cores, the problem that Intel has been trying to resolve for years.
The performance boost that Epyc processors provided were simply out of the box, AMD was claiming almost doubled performance of floating point units compared to the previous iterations.
The commercial 7nm processors are supposedly building around the same technology, and if such a gain can be achieved again in the Ryzen 3000 series CPUs, then AMD might be able to dominate Intel’s core series that has been dominating the market for decades.
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We do not have a final release date of the 7nm CPUs but according to reports, they will be showing the working sample at CES 2019 with a plausible release date of the 2nd quarter of 2019.
Now, AMD not only produces CPUs but also GPUs under their Radeon Technologies department. The story about the GPUs is the same again almost all of the market of Graphics cards is being dominated by Nvidia.
Nvidia has recently unveiled the 20 series GPUs that are built on the 12nm FinFET process, the main selling point of these Graphics cards is the RTX technology that shows the same properties of light as you see in real life. AMD has not yet countered these Graphics cards but in a recent post, they said they are working on their take on the Ray tracing algorithm, but they have other priorities to take care as soon as possible.
As announced in CES 2018 they are working on 7nm VEGA GPUs, that are arriving very soon. They have already demonstrated the power of their VEGA Graphics units and it remains to be seen if their newest offerings will be any match against Nvidia’s RTX series.
The 7nm VEGA 20 powered instinct Graphics processors M160 and M150 have slated release dates before the end of the year2018 which suggest AMD should not have difficulty producing 7nm chips fro its NAVI architecture.
Navi architecture according to AMD’s roadmap will also have the 7nm manufacturing process like VEGA 20 instinct graphics. The first Navi GPU will not be a revolutionary piece of silicon, but an update in the midrange series just like the RX 580 that is building under the 3rd rendition of the Polaris architecture.
However, whatever AMD is offering it can be credited against the upcoming sub RTXNvidia’s offerings that are the GTX 2060 and GTX 2050. Regardless, AMD’s offerings will be built on a much smaller die compared to Nvidia’s 12nm manufacturing scale. Lastly, we are still waiting for the AMD to have its last go against Intel and Nvidia, but it is confirmed the nest offerings will be built on the 7nm manufacturing process.