Amd publishes new amendment with globalfoundries to free itself from the "7nm tax"

AMD has released an amendment regarding its 7nm wafer supply agreement with GlobalFoundries Inc following its fourth quarter 2018 results report. In this amendment, AMD frees itself from the so-called " 7nm tax " that AMD must pay if it obtains wafers from a manufacturer other than this one.

Strategy aimed at optimizing your "CPU Chiplets" with multiple technologies

AMD has had an agreement with GobalFoundries Inc to date, making it the sole supplier of 12 and 14nm wafers for its successful Zen architecture. But this has changed due to the fact that this company is not going to continue manufacturing this type of latest generation 7 and 5nm processes, which has made it necessary for AMD to create an amendment that frees the company from paying any possible fine to GlobalFoundries before the search for other partners, thus eliminating the exclusivity you have with the previous company.

This amendment basically consists of three main points that say:

• That AMD will have full flexibility for wafer purchases from any manufacturer in the 7nm process without the need for one-time payments or exclusivity. In any event, GlobalFoundries Inc continues to be a long-term strategic partner for AMD at the 12nm node and It finally says that purchase commitments (with GlobalFoundries) and prices at 12nm and above will be in effect from 2019 to 2021.

This is in keeping with the strategy AMD has in mind for its new Zen 2 architecture processors . In this new architecture, modules with different chips exist under a single solid element called “ Chiplet ”. In this Chiplet, components built in 7nm will coexist as the processing cores, but also from the previous 14nm architecture, such as memory controllers or the PCIe I / O interface. Precisely these new 14nm I / O matrices will continue to be supplied by GlobalFoundries, while the 7nm architecture will be manufactured by the TSMC company.

The implementation of the Chiplet with these two architectures, will be assembled by GlobalFoundries in China or Malaysia, and it is precisely for this reason that the amendment also includes AMD's commitment to buy 12 and 14nm technology from GloFo until 2021. The consequences of This new agreement means that the manufacturer AMD can bet heavily on its new architecture without increasing the prices of its processing units, something very positive for the end customer.

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