AMD Planning Graphics Refresh in 2015, 16nm FinFET In 2016

AMD’s Chief Technology Officer Mark Papermaster has just presented at the Barclays Global Technology Conference. The CTO talked about AMD’s current progress in the on-going transition as well as the importance of Lisa Su’s new role as President and CEO of AMD.

The CTO focused on AMD’s current strategy and talked about AMD’s future technology plans. The industry veteran has also incidentally reaffirmed a belief that we held all along which is that AMD may indeed be preparing 20nm GPUs for 2015. We’ve covered the leaked specifications of Fiji XT, the GPU which will supposedly be AMD’s flagship for the new Rx 300 series next year in previous articles. So I will not focus too much on Fiji XT in particular but rather on the interesting revelations by Mark Papermaster.

AMD Preparing a Next Generation Discrete Graphics Refresh For 2015 – FinFET for 2016

Mark Papermaster at the Barclays Global Technology Conference.

So again graphics remains one of our pillars of strength and focus at AMD and it has been historical leapfrog game of who has the leadership, but between us and our lead competitor here. So you’re not surprised, my answer, we are not taking the foot off the gas. So you’ll see continued very, very strong graphics, we’ll have a refresh that you’ll see, that we’ll talk about later in 2015 that we are excited about.

Mark Papermaster has made it very clear that AMD will be introducing both 28nm (Carrizo and Carrizo-L) and 20nm products (Skybridge, Console APU shrink, GPUs) next year. He did not specify which products exactly will go on which process but it can be deduced from AMD’s previous official statements, rodmaps as well as very legitimate leaks that indeed AMD will introduce both 28nm and 20nm products as described above.

Is technology remain important? Absolutely, and we’ll continue to transition and we have our FinFET designs well underway, but we won’t be the first user, the bleeding edge of any new technology node. You will see us be a very, very fast follower, so we’re right on track with our FinFET designs and what you will see next year really is 28-nanometer and 20- nanometer products from AMD.

Mark Papermaster also promised a fundamental leap in energy efficiency with the new CPU and GPU designs coming in 2015 and even more so in 2016.

Again, we are interested in markets that we can differentiate in. What does AMD do? AMD have such strength in our products is combining very, very efficient CPU with leadership graphics. And as you start adding functionality in these two-in-one devices that plays to our strength including now we announced that we have a new device next year codename Carrizo, it plays beautifully into the space. Leading-edge graphics incredibly power efficient, so we are very excited about that.

It will be very interesting to see what the graphics refresh is made up of exactly. We could very well see brand new 20nm GPUs in addition to enhanced and improved versions of current 28nm GPUs such as Hawaii and Tonga get re-introduced.

According to the company’s CTO, AMD is currently very active in FinFET designs for all new CPU and GPU core designs and technology which the company will be introducing in 2016.

And what I am excited about going forward is that you go into 2016 and beyond. Now you will start to see the benefit of those new IPs that they have a long lead-time development. So new CPU cores, new graphics substations with yet again much higher performance per watt, we’ll continue our pace going forward and again its going to be an AMD about getting great products, with a very, very deep partnership with our customers.

It will be very interesting to see how 2015 evolves in terms of new product launches by AMD as well as the introduction of FreeSync monitors to the market and the release of the Mantle development kit into the public domain. 2015 is shaping up to be a much more exciting year than 2014 for the industry.