AMD span-off its fabrication business, Global Foundaries, in 2009 and since then the production company has struggled to keep pace with the trends set by other developers around the world. However it looks like after a year of problems, Global Foundaries and AMD have managed to successfully put together some 14nm hardware.
The news is that the first FinFET samples from Global Foundaries have arrived at AMD and they work correctly, which means that larger scale production of the hardware can begin next year, ushering in AMD's new Zen line of CPUs.
As Anandtech points out though, the big news of this announcement is that Global Foundaries also successfully produced the 14nm parts using the Lower Power Plus system, a second generation FinFET design previously pioneered by the likes of Samsung. Simply using that process allows for around a 10 percent performance gain across the board, so that's good news for AMD and good news for consumers.
AMD has put a lot of its eggs in the Global Foundaries basket when it comes to producing its next generation of CPUs so the fabricator will need to get its facilities up to scratch if it wants to produce the quantity that AMD will be expecting by the middle of 2016. Worst case by the end of the year, but AMD's financials are struggling enough that some people believe it will run into real problems before then.
Do you think AMD can hang on long enough for Zen to make a difference? And will it?