Samsung and GlobalFoundries team up for next-gen AMD GPUs, APUs

A new report is claims Samsung and GlobalFoundries will team up to make 
next-generation AMD APUs and GPUs at the 14nm node. In the past, AMD 
sourced its big-core APUs from GlobalFoundries and its smaller, budget CPU 
cores, graphics cards, and game consoles from TSMC. Moving most of this 
business to the Samsung / GlobalFoundries alliance would be a major shift 
from AMD’s earlier strategy.

It is definitely more of what AMD actually wanted to do with the GlobalFoundries 
spin-off in the first place. When AMD first created GF, it penciled down wafer 
agreements that allowed it to continue producing GPU hardware at TSMC, 
but specified that all future 28nm products would be built at GF. 
This never materialised ,kudos to GlobalFoundries’ problems with Krishna and 
Wichita back several years ago. 
We got it from facts that 20nm versions of the modern consoles were also 
planned for GlobalFoundries, before that was canceled.

We can’t say anything about AMD’s upcoming GPUs just yet, but the Korean 
Times is claiming that the upcoming high-end APU, Greenland, will offer up 
to 2x higher performance-per-watt than Fiji. That’s entirely reasonable, given that
all next-generation lithography nodes offer companies a range of performance 
and power consumption to target. The figures we’ve seen for 14nm in general 
have suggested either 50% reduced power at the same performance or 20-30% 
improved performance at equivalent power.

AMD is structuring Greenland and its other GPUs on Samsung’s 14nm LPP 
(Low Power Plus) process, but GF has hinted us that it’s done some customization 
to make sure the process node is suited to higher power GPUs. We don’t know 
yet if AMD has split its foundry orders between TSMC and GF for next-gen 
graphics or not — it’s entirely possible that the company will do high-end desktop 
cards, with 150W+ TDPs at TSMC, and mobile hardware at GF.

AMD would likely prefer to avoid such situations, since they increase overhead 
costs associated with bringing up multiple designs and different foundries. But the
company plays coy on its foundry partners and doesn’t like to disclose who builds 
which parts until we can read the labels for ourselves.

There’s no word on whether or not the Xbox One and PS4 will see die shrinks 
and fresh SKUs in 2016, but we expect that they will. We’re coming up on the 
three-year anniversary of each platform, and after skipping the 20nm refresh cycle, 
both Microsoft and Sony are likely wanting to launch new hardware. There’s also 
no word on whether we’ll actually see fresh console hardware as early as 2018, 
though that’s not something we’d expect MS or Sony to announce until much 
closer to debut.