AMD 7nm products are going to be the game changers in 2019, at least for team Red. The AMD Radeon VII is based on the 7nm node and so are the upcoming AMD Navi graphics cards. AMD’s supplier GlobalFoundries recently announced that it will not be taking part in the race to 7nm and beyond and this was an issue because AMD needed smaller nodes in order to compete with Nvidia and Intel.
The new deal with GlobalFoundries allows AMD to freely pick another foundry for its 7nm and 5nm production. Before this agreement, AMD would have to pay millions for this but that is not the case now. AMD will not be getting its orders from TSMC that will deliver the 7nm nodes for upcoming AMD Navi and AMD Ryzen products.
While AMD is free to buy 7nm chips from TSMC or Samsung, it will have to buy a specific volume of 12LP and 14LPP chips from GloablFoundries as well in order to avoid the penalty fees. This might be a better deal than what AMD had in the past but this means that the company will have to fulfill orders from 2019-2021. While we do not know what the specific volume is you can expect it to be pretty high.
If AMD fails to comply with the agreed volume then AMD will have to pay part of the difference. We will have to wait and see what happens but keeping in mind how AMD has grown in the past 2 years, I think the company should be fine.
AMD has not only announced that there will be more products coming up in the past but also mentioned that the company is working on ray tracing as well. Keeping in mind that AMD is going to power the upcoming generation of consoles, it is possible that the Xbox One Scarlet and PS5 could support some form of ray tracing.
Let us know what you think about AMD 7nm products and which one you are most interested in.
