AMD Will Fab Its 7nm 'Rome' Epyc CPUs at TSMC, Not GlobalFoundries

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Jul. 30, 2018 – 

AMD hasn't even launched its second-generation Threadripper family yet, but the company is hard at work on its 7nm follow-up to the Epyc server family. We don't know much at all about these new CPUs, codenamed "Rome," but during its most recent conference call, AMD did drop one surprising fact: These chips are being built at TSMC, not GlobalFoundries.

Ever since AMD spun its Dresden fabs and nascent 28nm facility off into its own company (GlobalFoundries), GF has been the firm's preferred partner for all things CPU. While AMD's Kabini and Temash were both built at TSMC, this was a last-minute effort on AMD's part – the chips were originally designed to be built at GF and were moved only when AMD couldn't get yield. To-date, we know that TSMC has handled console manufacturing for AMD SoCs and Atom fabbing for Intel during the short-lived SoFIA partnership. Neither project translates to much experience building big-core x86 work, but AMD was clearly satisfied with the results of the work – so much so, it moved its big-core production on Epyc over to the Taiwanese foundry.

AMD had previously stated that it would work with both TSMC and GF at 7nm, so that isn't a surprise, but the only part we knew was being built at TSMC was a 7nm Radeon Vega machine intelligence chip. In last week's conference call, Su said: "We are working with both the TSMC and GlobalFoundries in 7-nanometer. As for the 7-nanometer Rome that we're currently sampling, that's being manufactured at TSMC."

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