Well, let’s do one more AMD related item that will make your eyebrows frown. Globalfoundries Chief Technical Officer, Gary Patton, recently talked about the upcoming 7nm manufacturing generation. The advantages compared to 14nm have grown significantly. The die sizes could be more than halved, clock rates in a range of 5.0 GHz are realistic.
This could be interesting for AMD’s Zen 2, presumably in the form of Ryzen 3000, as reported on PC Games hardware Germany. Next month, you guys will see Pinnacle Ridge released, a Zen Refresh (“Zen +”) within the Ryzen 2000 series, which will leverage the enhanced 12LP over the older (last years) 14LPP process. It gets more exciting with Zen 2, which will be manufactured at 7nm. Although AMD has not yet confirmed that they will use Globalfoundries (or TSMC) as partner, GlowFlo (ex AMD) probably will be the partner. Late February, AnandTech spoke to Globalfoundries’ CTO, Gary Patton about the 7nm generation. The article has been largely unnoticed but contains some interesting details
Patton switched from IBM to Globalfoundries in 2015 when the manufacturing division was sold to the partner. Since then, the development department has made significant progress in the first 7nm process. Originally, one would at best assume a halving of the required chip area compared to 14nm. Improvements in the wiring, in particular, mean that the area savings should now be around a factor of 2.7. A hypothetical zeppelin-die (Ryzen 1000) at 7nm would therefore only about 80 instead of 213 mm² large. This all allows much potential for additional or larger CPU Cores. In addition, Globalfoundries expects a performance increase of 40 percent. Clock speeds in the range of 5.0 GHz seem quite realistic according to Patton, whereby it will finally arrive on the chip design – CPUs must be designed on such frequencies in order to be able to use the theoretical process possibilities. Time will tell, Ryzen 3000 going for 5 GHz? Bring it on.
