We recently published a piece telling you that AMD's 20nm GPUs have been delayed and won't be appearing in Early 2015 (will appear in later quarters). However the Italian publication Bitsandchips.it has revealed that AMD will be using the SHP (super high performance) 28 nanometer node from Global Foundries for the intermediary 28nm GPUs. But here is the golden question: which GPUs will AMD utilize this process for? The speculated 'enhanced' Hawaii' or early variants of Caribbean Islands?

AMD using 28nm SHP Process from GloFo for Intermediary GPUs in 2015

We already knew AMD is bringing out 28nm GPUs after our last piece, but the question still remained about the exact process; something which has now been pinned to Global Foundries. This is something that most analysts were expecting, and if true, isn't really surprising considering the comments AMD dropped at preceding technology conferences. The report further goes on to state that 20nm TSMC is not a possibility since the only 20nm node that TSMC has is the SOC LP one which can't be utilized for high performance ASIC applications - something we have stated before too. However, a very interesting statement that they make is that AMD will be using 14nm LP Samsung (-GloFo?) by the end of 2015. This implies that we are looking at FinFETs by the end of 2015 and Low Power node suggests APUs and embedded applications.

The report further mentions that they are choosing not to go with TSMC's 28nm node because of the very high cost now associated with that node, as opposed to using a pseudo-inhouse foundry like GloFo. Not only will that be cheaper, but development more flexible and supply line interactive. Finally they mention that by 2016, AMD could utilize 16nm FinFET TSMC for high end GPUs. They are basically stating that Zen and K12 will be produced at TSMC and not at GloFo (atleast initially). It is possible that AMD will shift to Global Foundries once the node matures. It is hard to tell the speculation apart from the actual leak in reports like this, but most of the report aligns with our own writeups.

There is some contradiction between our report and this one, but I believe that is for the readers to decide as our job is to report with complete professional impartiality, not to mention speculating on speculation is, frankly, quite redundant.