It is announced by GlobalFoundries that they will stop the production of 7nm chips to focus on 14nm and 12nm and that they will not investigate 5nm and 3nm.
So far everything has been mockery regarding Intel's 10nm and the difficulties they are having to achieve optimal production that does not cause an increase in prices. GlobalFoundries has just announced something very important and that is the cancellation of the development of 7nm lithography, which would explain why AMD has brought the entire production of 7nm-based chips to TSMC.
GlobalFoundries for the development of 7nm lithography.
The statement is quite brutal since within it you can read that they will work to optimize the 12nm and 14nm processes, in addition to making a 5% cut in staff and they will be forced to renegotiate the agreements with AMD and IBM.
TSMC is currently the only company in the market that can manufacture 7nm chips and things do not look to change in the short term. Likewise, AMD passes the Ryzen 3000 Series and the Navi GPUs to TSMC where it already had the production of the EPYC 2 and the new Vega GPUs for the professional segment. AMD emphasizes that it does not alter its Roadmap, but of course, we will see the power of the Taiwanese semiconductor company to take on this volume of work.
We add to this that the Research Alliance agreement signed with IBM could end this year because GlobalFoundries does not see the investment in researching 5nm and 3nm as useful. Again it is a blow to AMD who has always been a strategic partner for GlobalFoundries. It should be noted that AMD sold part of its plants to GlobalFoundries, which has been beneficial for both parties, so much so that AMD put 300 million dollars on the table for GB to develop the 7nm process.
GlobalFoundries has been in serious financial trouble for some time to the point of having to license Samsung Foundries 14nm technology to stay competitive. Patents and development equipment have been obtained from IBM as well as billions of dollars invested in the 7nm process, which by all appearances has been thrown away. GlobalFoundries has all of their plants at full capacity and they do not plan to open new plants.
Source: Anandtech
