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Pure-play Foundries to Prevail in Future

Pure-play Foundries to Prevail in Future
by Pawan Fangaria on 01-17-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: Foundries

In a consolidating semiconductor business environment and innovation in semiconductor fabrication already scaling new heights with existing strong players, where do you think the wafer capacity should concentrate? It’s pure-play foundries or pure-play-like foundries, and those who supply high-volume common components such as memories. By pure-play-like foundries I mean IDMs which are fairly open to manufacture for other fabless companies; Samsung is at the top, very recently they won a deal with Qualcomm to manufacture their Snapdragon 820 chips.

When we talk about memory suppliers, like pure-play foundries they also manufacture memories for the whole world, from B2B up to B2C segments. So that’s natural for them to have large wafer fab capacities for memories.

A chart from IC Insights shows the world wafer fab capacity heavily concentrated, 72% of total with top 10 semiconductor manufacturers.


Samsungbeing at the top, the second wafer producer is the largest pure-play foundry TSMC. From the chart, it’s impressive to see GlobalFoundries having largest yr-yr increase in wafer capacity at 18%; TSMC’s yr-yr increase is next at 14%. Also, GlobalFoundries climbed at rank higher in 2015 compared to 2014.

The top memory suppliers, Samsung, Micron, Toshiba, and SK Hynix occupy highest ranks within top 5. So, that explains very well the memory suppliers’ dominance in wafer fab capacity.

Micron has accumulated substantial memory capacity through acquisitions of Elpida and Rexchip, and also from extra Inotera capacity and stake in IM Flash Technologies fabs. Similarly, Toshiba has substantial addition of flash memory capacity from SanDisk. So, we can see fair amount of consolidation in this space.

If we see overall percentage share region wise, South Korea with Samsung and SK Hynix dominates with 23.6% of total worldwide wafer capacity which is at 16350 thousand wafers per month. North America is next with four companies (Micron, GF, Intel, and TI) there at 22.3%. Taiwan’s TSMC and UMC have 15% share.

Going forward we are going to see more consolidation in fab business; setting up new fab is becoming unbearable by any new or existing weak players. Also we may see IDMs opening up their running fabs for manufacturing chips for other fabless companies, but that depends on how viable their fabs are in terms of technology and cost, and market requirement; IoT and automotive segments can offer varied requirements. At the same time some IDMs may go fab-lite and get their chips manufactured by pure-play foundries. We have to see.

IC Insights report can be found here.

Pawan Kumar Fangaria
Founder & President at www.fangarias.com

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ARM on Moore’s Law at 50: Are we planning for retirement?

ARM on Moore’s Law at 50: Are we planning for retirement?
by Scotten Jones on 01-16-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: Arm, IP

On Monday morning on December 7, 2016 Greg Yeric of Arm gave an excellent and wide ranging plenary talk at IEDM entitled “Moore’s Law at 50: Are we planning for retirement?”. You can download Greg’s slide deck here.

Continue reading “ARM on Moore’s Law at 50: Are we planning for retirement?”

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How Artificial Intelligence Will Kickstart the Internet of Things

How Artificial Intelligence Will Kickstart the Internet of Things
by Ahmed Banafa on 01-15-2016 at 4:00 pm
Categories: AI, IoT

The possibilities that IoT brings to the table are endless. IoT continues its run as one of the most popular technology buzzwords of the year, and now the new phase of IoT is pushing everyone to ask hard questions about the data collected by all devices and sensors of IoT.
Continue reading “How Artificial Intelligence Will Kickstart the Internet of Things”

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AMD’s GPUOpen Initiative Architected To Move The Industry In A Different Direction

AMD’s GPUOpen Initiative Architected To Move The Industry In A Different Direction
by Patrick Moorhead on 01-15-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: EDA

GPUOpen is a new initiative started by Advanced Micro Devices’ Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) as a way for the company to continue to reach out to the needs to developers by giving them a better development environment. The idea behind GPUOpen is born out of the work that Advanced Micro Device’s did with Mantle, their own low-level API which eventually found itself reworked into the industry standard Vulkan API. Thanks to Mantle we also have other low-level APIs that allow developers to get more access to hardware and better performance and experience. GPU Open is the next step in the evolution of AMD’s mission to improve the PC game development environment while also making it more and more open.

The GPUOpen initiative is comprised of a few major components- direct access, open source software and industry standards. The direct access portion of GPUOpen means that Advanced Micro Devices’ RTG will give developers even more access to the functions of the GPU than they have in the past, giving them even more control of the GPU and more down to the metal hardware access than before.

The open source software portion of GPUOpen includes AMD’s own movement of their development tools into open source, enabling developers to see all of the code and improve upon it as they see necessary. In addition to open sourcing their tools, AMD is also putting a renewed focus on their open source Linux drivers, increasing the amount of supported Linux distributions as well as accelerate access to new products and features. However, not all features will be open source as some of them will either remain closed source or start off as closed source and then become open source, like Open CL and Vulkan. In addition to all of the open source tools, there’s also a special set of features, known as the Boltzmann Initiative that AMD has created to allow CUDA apps to be run on AMD GPUs. Another part of the open source software is the implementation of GPUOpen Compute which is AMD RTG’s move to create an open source end-to-end compute infrastructure for usage models that exist today and into the future.

Another aspect of GPUOpen is AMD’s willingness to include others in their standard to try to help make it part of the industry standard. This move is similar to what AMD has done in the past with their technologies like Mantle and FreeSync. While I’m unaware that Intel and NVIDIA have taken up AMD on their offers to make Mantle or FreeSync industry standards, in one way or another AMD’s willingness to be open has turned some form of their technology into an industry standard. With FreeSync, we are seeing companies like Intel stating that they are looking to implement VESA’s adaptive-sync technology which is the fundamental underpinnings of what makes FreeSync possible. Additionally, as mentioned earlier, Mantle eventually became the foundation for Vulkan which is the newest low level industry standard API which already appears to have the support of many hardware vendors and developers. While it isn’t much of a stretch to assume that some portions of GPUOpen could become industry standards, it’s very unlikely we’ll see NVIDIA jumping at the opportunity to participate and mirror AMD’s GPUOpen activities.

Ultimately, what GPUOpen needs to do is make AMD’s GPUs more attractive to both developers and users. AMD believes that opening up their GPUs even more will make them more attractive to developers and hopefully improve performance in games as a side effect, making their GPUs more attractive to consumers and selling more GPUs. AMD managed to squeeze quite a bit of extra gaming performance from the jump to DX12 in Microsoft’s Windows 10 from previous versions and it may be that we could see something similar happen in Linux or in professional environments where AMD needs to regain share the most.


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CES 2016 is all about the IoT

CES 2016 is all about the IoT
by Bill Jewell on 01-15-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: IoT

CES 2016 last week in Las Vegas was a huge success. Over 3800 exhibitors occupied over 2.47 million square feet. Attendance was over 170,000 including 50,000 from outside the U.S. CES (previously Consumer Electronics Show) was put on by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA, previously the Consumer Electronics Association). The name changes reflect the broadening of high technology consumer goods to include more than electronics – software, systems, advanced materials, etc.

We at Semiconductor Intelligence attended CES 2016. Our daily impressions are on our website at CES 2016 .

The Internet of Things (IoT) was very prominent at CES, overshadowing traditional consumer products such as PCs and smartphones. Intel – the dominant processor supplier for PCs – featured virtual reality, fitness trackers, smart watches, smart eyewear, gaming and drones. Qualcomm – the largest processor supplier for smartphones – pushed smart homes, smart buildings, robotics, automotive and other IoT devices.

The IoT market is currently a relatively small part of the overall consumer electronics market. However it represents a major source of growth. As shown in the table below, IoT represents only 3% of the total U.S. electronics market in 2016, according to CTA. Over half of the market consists of recent growth drivers such as LCD TVs, portable computing and smartphones. Despite strong growth of UHD TVs, the overall LCD TV market growth is flat with 2015. Portable computing includes laptop PCs, tablets, and 2-in-1 PCs. CTA expects strong 48% growth of 2-in-1 PCs in 2016, but this is offset by only 2% growth in laptops and a 12% decline in tablets resulting in only 1% growth in overall portable computing. Smartphones revenues are forecast to increase 4% in 2016, a significant slowing from double-digit growth in previous years.


Wearables (smart watches, fitness trackers, health trackers) and smart home devices (security, climate control, lighting, etc.) are projected at $6 billion in the U.S. in 2016. These categories are key drivers of growth in 2016, with wearables at 20% and smart home devices at 18%. The impact of IoT devices is even more pronounced at the global level. A GfK/CTA forecast has global wearable market growth of 47% in U.S. dollars and 58% in units in 2016. This compares to total global tech device sales in 2016 down 2% in U.S. dollars and flat in units.

The Internet of Things is becoming a major driver of the electronics and semiconductor industries. All major consumer electronics companies and numerous startups are focusing on IoT. The question is which devices and companies will be successful. In many ways the current IoT industry resembles the Internet boom in the late 1990s. The IoT market will probably experience a shakeout in a few years where the weaker companies and technologies will crash and burn. However IoT will become eventually become an important part of peoples’ lives, as the Internet is today.

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IoT Collateral Damage – it’s not if, but when

IoT Collateral Damage – it’s not if, but when
by Bill Montgomery on 01-14-2016 at 4:00 pm
Categories: IoT, Security

Business history is littered with once-successful companies that couldn’t see the market tsunami that was coming their way until it was too late to do anything but stand up and be walloped by a wave of change that obliterated their businesses.

Continue reading “IoT Collateral Damage – it’s not if, but when”

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Semiconductor IP Comes of Age

Semiconductor IP Comes of Age
by Daniel Payne on 01-14-2016 at 12:00 pm
Categories: EDA

I love reading about good news in the EDA and Semiconductor IP space, especially in light of the recent stock market trending downward in January. The best news that I’ve read in the past week is about the Q3 2015 revenue numbers collected by EDAC, because it shows that Semiconductor IP (SIP) surpassed CAE tool revenues for the very first time ever. I’ve been reading about the growth of IP revenues over the years, and it is now larger than CAE sales. Here is the table showing that SIP had revenues of $652.9 million in Q3 2015 for an annual increase of 11.4%, while CAE revenues were at $634.7 million a 5.0% increase.


Q3 2015 EDA Revenue Growth by Category

Companies like Synopsys and Cadence have invested strongly in SIP, so it’s no surprise that they are still the #1 and #2 EDA companies, respectively. Mentor Graphics is strong in the category of IC Physical Design & Verification which saw the largest percentage increase of 14.0%. The downside of Q3 2015 was in the low-margin category of Services with an 11.4% decline, followed by the mature category of PCB & MCM with a 3.0% decline.

Finally, the Japan region experienced growth of 8.3% after years of under-performing the rest of the world. Asia Pacific (APAC) lead again with a growth of 11.6%.


Q3 2015 EDA Revenue Growth by Regions

The largest region of EDA revenues remains the Americas at 48%, followed by: APAC, EMEA, Japan.


Q3 2015 EDA Revenue by Region

It’s fun to look at EDA revenues for the past 20 years, where we can see the steady increase of SIP and CAE especially after the 2009 melt down period.


20 Years of EDA Revenue: 1996-2015

When we look at the stock market performance of EDA and IP stocks over the past six months it shows a downward trend of:

  • Dassault Systemes, -2.67%
  • Cadence Design, -5.15%
  • Ansys, -7.92%
  • ARM, -11.67%
  • Synopsys, -19.95%
  • Mentor Graphics, -37.78%
  • Imagination Technologies, -48.76%


Past 6 Months Stock Prices, EDA and SIP

Let’s hope that this stock price decline has bottomed out and will correct in 2016.

To get more details about the EDA Market Statistics visit here.

(Full disclosure – I own none of the stocks mentioned in this blog)

About EDAC
The Electronic Design Automation Consortium (EDAC) is the international association of companies developing EDA tools and services that enable engineers to create the world’s electronic products. The EDAC mission is to promote the health of the EDA industry, and to increase awareness of the crucial role EDA plays in today’s global economy.

EDAC has a number of committees focused on issues of common interest where members can meet to influence and stay abreast of industry initiatives; initiatives such as Anti-Piracy, Export Controls, and the Industry OS Roadmap. By focusing on commonality and promoting cooperation, the EDA Consortium augments the effectiveness of the tools, services, and communications provided by its members for the customer community that the member companies serve.

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The China Semiconductor Market Explained!

The China Semiconductor Market Explained!
by Daniel Nenni on 01-14-2016 at 7:00 am
Categories: ESD Alliance, Events, Foundries

The overwhelming theme of the SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium in Half Moon Bay this week was China. On day number two Sunny Hui, SVP of SMIC, did one of the best overviews of the China market I have seen, absolutely. While I’m not allowed to post the presentation in its entirety I can post up to three slides (the prettiest ones) and summarize the rest.

In regards to the growth engine of the global economy, there are six market segments that interest us semiconductor folks the most. Here are the China consumer shipments and China’s worldwide market share in 2014 of those six:

[LIST=1]

  • Automotive: 25M units shipped (27% China)
  • Mobile Phones: 475M units shipped (25% China)
  • TV: 53M total shipped (23% China)
  • PC/Notebook: 62M units shipped (22% China)
  • Set-top Box: 52M units shipped (18% China)
  • Tablet/Ultrabook: 42M units shipped (16%) China

    Remember, population is the driving force for semiconductor demand and China is experiencing the fastest total growth in human history. The US actually has the fastest growth percentage in the last ten years at 34% (238 to 319 million) versus China at 30% (1.0 to 1.36 billion). And that is with the China one child policy which was changed to a two child policy in 2015. One of the key population growth drivers in the US is immigration so this is not the time to be building walls.


    Today 40% of worldwide semiconductor shipments are to China, the U.S. is getting 14% and Japan is getting 10%. In regards to manufacturing, China dominates electronics manufacturing by a very wide margin and it was pointed out that cheap labor no longer powers China’s manufacturing engine. China manufacturing is highly automated and fully supported by the Chinese Government. I would also have to add that environmental restrictions are not as much of a hindrance as in the U.S. Here are the manufacturing numbers for the top six markets:

    [LIST=1]

  • Smart Phone> 70%
  • Tablet > 75%
  • Notebook PC 80%
  • DTV 50%
  • Monitors 88%
  • Set-top Box > 80%

    Chinese consumer electronics brands are also on the rise and the semiconductor content is inherently Chinese of course: 28% of world wide mobile phones, 24% of LCD TVs, 21% of PC/Notebooks, and more than 25% of tablets. Here are some of the company names you may recognize especially if you were at CES last week: Lenovo, Huawei, ZTE, TCL, OPPO, Hisense, Coolpad, Creative Life, Changchong, Skyworth, Konka, Great Wall, Haier, Tsinghau, and Ramos. And you can bet the chips that power these products are of Chinese origin if at all possible. The recent Huawei smartphone for example:


    Moving forward China is spending billions of dollars in ten areas over the next 10 years:

    [LIST=1]

  • Information Technology
  • Digital Machine and Robotics
  • Aerospace and Aviation
  • Green and New Energy Cars
  • Advanced Rail Road
  • Oceanic Engineering
  • Power Equipment
  • Bio and E Medical
  • Agricultural Equipment
  • New Materials

    According to Sonny Hui the next big China thing is in fact IoT and big data. Those two go together like peanut butter and jelly of course:


    The common theme amongst the China presentations was “joint partnerships”. Hopefully you get the picture here, semiconductor and electronics are part of a very aggressive national charter in China and it is not just economic. The unspoken truth is that semiconductors and electronics are critical to National Security and nobody knows this better than China. And as we all know security starts with silicon so if you want to do business in China you had better get very comfortable with joint ventures.

    Also read:Qualcomm Forms Joint Venture In China to Take on Intel

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    Advanced Micro Devices’s Head Of Radeon Technologies Group, Raja Koduri, Talks About Their Future

    Advanced Micro Devices’s Head Of Radeon Technologies Group, Raja Koduri, Talks About Their Future
    by Patrick Moorhead on 01-13-2016 at 4:00 pm
    Categories: EDA

    Since Advanced Micro Devices announced their new Radeon Technologies Group (RTG), many have wondered what direction the graphics division would go with its new-found autonomy. The new RTG group within Advanced Micro Devices is still a wholly-owned division of the company but still potentially ripe for acquisition or spinoff. The new head of this division is none other than Advanced Micro Devices’ head graphics guy, Raja Koduri, who recently spoke with select industry analysts about the future of the Advanced Micro Devices graphics business and what it means to the RTG. I thought it was important for those who track Advanced Micro Devices to hear this.

    Koduri spoke on two major topics during the conversation including the new direction of their graphics driver software and how they intend to grow the new RTG’s business over the course of the next two years. As a part of his explanation of the future of the RTG he also talked about the different components of the company that make up RTG.

    The RTG organization will be comprised of four different components all connected to one another and enabled by content, which will be headed up by Roy Taylor. The three non-content aspects of RTG will be Architecture, Business and Execution. This means that RTG will be leaning more heavily on content as an enabling factor for RTG’s growth. This is a sound strategy when you consider that a lot of NVIDIA’s success has been built on their close relationships with developers and being able to get titles to work well with their graphics cards through their TWIMTBP (The Way It’s Meant To Be Played) program. Also, in this age of tech, content is where everything starts and especially in gaming, content drives the hardware preference, not the other way around. Advanced Micro Devices is already on their way to accomplishing this with their involvement with Electronic Arts on the year’s possibly hottest title, Star Wars Battlefront. They are also positioning themselves heavily within the VR community as innovators with technologies like Liquid VR.

    Raja also talked about how Advanced Micro Devices’ RTG will need to execute on their architectural designs and create brand new GPUs, something that Advanced Micro Devices has struggled with lately. He promised two brand new GPUs in 2016, which are hopefully going to both be 14nm/16nm FinFET from GlobalFoundries or TSMC and will help make Advanced Micro Devices more power and die size competitive. Having more products to sell is a good thing for Advanced Micro Devices because there’s no getting around that some of AMD’s GPU architectures have gotten quite long in the tooth.

    They are also planning a stronger professional graphics push with these new products and their renewed focus on better and more stable software. This is where Advanced Micro Devices has already recently made huge investments as the company is preparing to launch a new suite of graphics driver software for their consumer graphics division. AMD’s share in professional graphics is low enough that any competition that they bring NVIDIA could significantly help their market share in this high margin business. AMD has hired Sean Burke to help drive this forward. Sean was a president at Flex (Flextronics) and Nortek and a senior executive at Hewlett-Packard, Compaq and Dell, and knows what he’s doing. He is known by many in the industry as the father of Dell’s Dimension and Compaq’s Prolinea, all game-changers. (Full disclosure, I worked with Sean at Compaq Computer Corporation in the mid-90′s.)

    Koduri went on to explain that Advanced Micro Devices’ strategy to capture consumer and professional graphics will be by providing fully immersive experiences that range from education and medicine to gaming and virtual reality with plenty of overlap in between. They also talked about expanding themselves into what they’re calling “instinctive computing” applications which involve medicine, factory automation, automotive and security. These are computing applications that are more natural to the environment and less obvious to the user and should come as natural user experiences. Obviously, Advanced Micro Devices is already present in a lot of these markets but perhaps isn’t that competitive or doesn’t quite have the right solutions, yet. Their clear focus on these immersive experiences and instinctive computing applications are what they believe will help them improve their market share and more importantly profitability.

    The three key focuses are to gain discrete GPU market share in 2016 and 2017 as well as win the next generation of consoles, which will likely be designed for 4K in mind. The current generation of consoles are somewhat under-powered for the 4K TV era even though they all are shipping with Advanced Micro Devices graphics that could support 4K out. This could be a huge opportunity for Advanced Micro Devices since there’s a good chance that console makers will continue to stick with Radeon IP for their next generation consoles and give Advanced Micro Devices an even bigger advantage in the gaming space. AMD’s architectural decisions in the past seem to finally be catching up with them with DirectX 12 in the latest shipping version of Windows as it gives Radeon GPUs a significant performance uplift versus DirectX 12 against NVIDIA. These successes may see future consoles stick with Advanced Micro Devices and give them another few quarters of nice profitability when/if the new consoles ship in a few years.
    As a part of Advanced Micro Devices RTG’s investment in both consumer and professional graphics, the company is announcing a new graphics driver initiative. For one, AMD is killing the Catalyst driver brand altogether and is changing their driver names to “Radeon Software” with each annual update getting a new red color themed name. This upcoming driver version will be called “Crimson” and will feature different version numbers for each revision, with Advanced Micro Devices hoping to release at least one WHQL every two months with beta drivers in between.

    The new Radeon Software drivers will feature a simpler UX and improved aesthetics and are designed to be more user friendly. Advanced Micro Devices has done a very good job with their drivers as of late, with their support for Microsoft Windows 10 and DirectX 12 working out of the gate and delivering the best possible performance. I have used AMD’s in Windows 10 and, outside of some Preview issues, have been very impressed with their drivers’ stability and performance in games. With these improvements and their latest Windows 10 drivers hopefully Advanced Micro Devices can overcome their reputation for having “bad drivers” which they had earned over the years, which really is no longer the case. Having such a reputation has hurt the perception of the brand in the past and impacted sales even when their products were the best. Advanced Micro Devices and RTG have spent a lot of time and resources to improve their drivers and it’s really starting to show, but they need to continue to keep making consumers aware of the improvements.

    Lots of changes are coming for Advanced Micro Devices’ RTG this coming year and 2016 should be an extremely interesting year for graphics with new GPU architectures and process nodes. AMD’s RTG is a new organization that almost calls back to the ATi days, pre-Advanced Micro Devices acquisition, but with a new focus on today’s technologies and needs. For the industry’s sake, hopefully the company’s new organization will allow them to focus on bringing competition to NVIDIA while also working with more partners than they have in the past. If you caught NVIDIA’s latest earnings, they are on a roll. Again. Advanced Micro Devices’ RTG has a vision and a plan and they are already on the path towards potentially introducing some seriously competitive products into the market. It’s all about execution at this point.

    Raja Koduri, SVP & Chief Architect, Radeon Technologies at AMD (Image credit AMD)


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    FinFET will finally arrive for GPU’s in 2016

    FinFET will finally arrive for GPU’s in 2016
    by Tom Simon on 01-13-2016 at 12:00 pm
    Categories: FinFET, Foundries, GlobalFoundries

    It used to be that GPU chips moved to new process nodes pretty frequently, previously as often as annually. That is up until 2011. That was the year that 28nm GPU’s were unveiled. Since then there has been a long pause. Now in the wake of the 2016 CES both Nvidia, with its previously announced Pascal, and AMD, with the just announced Polaris, are both on record as moving from 28nm planar to FinFET nodes in 2016. This will make 2016 a big year for GPU’s. While Nvidia is going to be fabricating on TSMC’s 16FF+, AMD will most likely be using Globalfoundries’ 14nm FinFET process for the first of the Pascal family.

    In their announcement, AMD is touting huge power savings in their design. They demonstrated it using Star Wars Battle Front running at 60fps on 1080p monitors to compare their power consumption against Nvidia’s current 28nm offering. The AMD consumed ~85W while the Nvidia chip consumed ~150W. To be fair it is worth pointing out that is more of an illustration of the performance to power ratio between 28nm planar and FinFET. We’ll have to wait for Nvidia’s FinFET chip to do an apples-to-apples comparison between the two companies’ comparable offerings.

    AMD says that they have made major architectural changes to improve performance. On top of this they spent “months” tuning clock gating and power gating. FinFET of course offers big reductions in leakage power. AMD’s Polaris will support HDMI 2.0a and DisplayPort 1.3. It also will include H.265 Main 10 decoding at 4K. The first Polaris design will not use HBM, opting instead to use conventional GDDR5 memory for now. This makes sense for lower cost consumer products. But the option to switch to HBM is always available for subsequent high end offerings.

    At this point the biggest question is when will each competitor get to volume production and ship finished products. AMD has other big plans for 2016 as well. They are going to be rolling out their latest Zen architecture for CPU’s. AMD has undergone big changes over the years. But they are fundamentally doing battle with Nvidia and Intel at the same time. While they no longer have a captive foundry, they are working with Globalfoundries at 14nm on the new Polaris based GPU’s.

    It looks as though AMD is pitching Polaris as a way to offer higher performance graphics in chassis that had thermal dissipation issues such as laptops, and smaller form factor desktop computers. Also it will likely simplify power connections to discrete graphics cards. It’s good to see GPU’s moving forward after being stalled out at 28nm for an unprecedented 5 years. It seemed that while CPU’s and FPGA’s moved ahead, GPU consumers have had to wait for the architectural gains that a node change offers.

    More articles from Tom…