GloFo in trouble? pushing early retirement

[Notional]

1 hour ago, Doobeedoo said:

AMD Polaris and Ryzen are on LPE not LPP right? I remember their process is not mature enough. As far as Vega what will it be on hmm.

Ryzen is LPP, and I'm pretty sure Polaris is as well. LPE is more like mobile chips and the like.

[Citadelen]

11 minutes ago, Notional said:

Ryzen is LPP, and I'm pretty sure Polaris is as well. LPE is more like mobile chips and the like.

LPE as far as we know isn't anything I'm pretty sure, it was just a test node I think.

[zMeul]

53 minutes ago, Citadelen said:

I was bringing up your track record with their news items, the similarities with this article are in your amazing ability to draw wild conclusions and vehmently attack any positive news item about them. 

them who? GloFo who's about to boot people into early retirement and won't dismiss issuing some pink slips (to be read layoffs) too - yay!

[jasonc_01]

 

13 hours ago, namandoesnotpanic said:

Quick question, if they do go out of business, what does this mean for Ryzen, or AMD CPUs in general?

 

13 hours ago, zMeul said:

if GloGo goes bust, it's going to be really bad for AMD

 

12 hours ago, zMeul said:

considering almost all their products are made at GloFo ... yeah, it will be bad

going to a new fab would mean delays and shortages of products or outright lack of products on the market

 

AMD put a side deal in place with Samsung a few months before Ryzen was released, in case Gloflo could not deliver product for some reason. Maybe they new something was going on at gloflo?

 

I'm not sure what the details of said supply agreement were, or what products it could entail. 

[zMeul]

1 minute ago, jasonc_01 said:

AMD put a side deal in place with Samsung a few months before Ryzen was released, in case Gloflo could not deliver product for some reason. Maybe they new something was going on at gloflo?

 

I'm not sure what the details of said supply agreement were, or what products it could entail. 

all their Polaris GPUs and Zen based CPUs are manufactured at GloFo; whatever they have with Samsung is not for these

and it's easy to tell: all Ryzen CPUs have a laser engraving on the IHS: Diffused in US - that's GloFo's mark

[jasonc_01]

2 hours ago, zMeul said:

all their Polaris GPUs and Zen based CPUs are manufactured at GloFo; whatever they have with Samsung is not for these

and it's easy to tell: all Ryzen CPUs have a laser engraving on the IHS: Diffused in US - that's GloFo's mark

Sorry your misunderstanding what I said. I am not saying that they have a side deal with Samsung and are currently getting chips from both them and Gloflo right now. 

 

I said that AMD made a side deal supply agreement with Samsung that would allow them to have Samsung produce there products if Gloflo could not deliver product. Not sure how you got "Samsung is making AMD product right now" from that? 

[Sakkura]

15 hours ago, Citadelen said:

LPE as far as we know isn't anything I'm pretty sure, it was just a test node I think.

Samsung's 14LPE node was used for the Apple A9 and Samsung Exynos 7420. So it powered phones like the Iphone 6s and 6s Plus, and Samsung's Note 5 and various S6 models.

 

The same way, their 10LPE node is now used for the Exynos 8895.

 

LPE indicates an early node, but not just for testing.

[Sakkura]

On 12/4/2017 at 10:41 AM, zMeul said:

if GloGo goes bust, it's going to be really bad for AMD

 

16 hours ago, zMeul said:

no, I won't

why? I absolutely love it when you AMD fanbois are twitching and squirming when I post about AMD

also funny: this thread wasn't about AMD and yet .. we're discussing AMD  told you, I love it! you people are brilliant, not

Gee, I wonder why we ended up talking about AMD...

[AresKrieger]

The cost for cpu fabrication is going up at an alarming rate while sales in general are down, Intel never pushed there performance too hard for all these years not only due to amd being bead in the water but also due to the enormous cost it would take to make leaps rather than optimizations.

[AnonymousGuy]

On 4/12/2017 at 2:21 AM, ashypanda said:

GloFo should be able to keep afloat just by having Qualcomm as a client, as they ship a hell of a lot of ICs, but really all of their clients do, although it'd probably be better for them to either close a fab or consider a merger with another semiconductor manufacturer, as if they were to go bust the entire electronics industry would be in tatters as who could pick up the slack, as i don't think TMSC has the capacity, or that intel and samsung has the capability to pick up their clients. 

It's not that easy.  Designs are made with a foundry and fab process in mind.  It's not just a drag and drop of litho files from one foundry to another and you're off to the races.

[Sakkura]

1 hour ago, AnonymousGuy said:

It's not that easy.  Designs are made with a foundry and fab process in mind.  It's not just a drag and drop of litho files from one foundry to another and you're off to the races.

Chips can be dual sourced. Apple A9 was.

[Tomsen]

5 hours ago, AresKrieger said:

The cost for cpu fabrication is going up at an alarming rate while sales in general are down, Intel never pushed there performance too hard for all these years not only due to amd being bead in the water but also due to the enormous cost it would take to make leaps rather than optimizations.

The cost is higher than anticipated, but nothing outright alarming. The biggest issue is getting the price per wafer down to an economical level in a short timespan in regards to the process nodes lifetime.

 

For example is intel 14nm. Prices wasn't alarming, it was the time for how long it took for the prices to get down to economical levels. (which is probably why we see its lifetime extended).

 

In my point of view, Intel didn't push outright performances, but instead invested in other metrics (such as power-consumption/heat-output, die-size, IC integration, unify IC across markets, etc). If we only look at maximum performance (excluding SIMD) performance hasn't changed much from sandy-bridge, but given any of the other metrics, skylake/kaby-lake is pulling much further ahead.

 

It is a matter of investment prioritizations.

 

1 minute ago, Sakkura said:

Chips can be dual sourced. Apple A9 was.

Which isn't cheap. You have to validated the mask for both foundries. Which was exactly his point.

[Sakkura]

4 minutes ago, Tomsen said:

Which isn't cheap. You have to validated the mask for both foundries. Which was exactly his point.

"Not cheap" is not the same as impossible.

[Tomsen]

1 minute ago, Sakkura said:

"Not cheap" is not the same as impossible.

Did anyone make the point it was impossible?

[Sakkura]

26 minutes ago, Tomsen said:

Did anyone make the point it was impossible?

Someone objected to the claim that it was possible.

[Tomsen]

6 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

Someone objected to the claim that it was possible.

I think you are misreading him. He never objected to the claim that it was possible, merely that it wasn't easy.

[Mr.Meerkat]

On 12/04/2017 at 9:40 AM, namandoesnotpanic said:

Quick question, if they do go out of business, what does this mean for Ryzen, or AMD CPUs in general?

I personally don't think GloFlo will ever go out of business with Mubadala Development Company being their Parent company...I mean Mubadala is owned by the UAE government which should say something about the amount of money they have  

 

Also, Mubadala owns 10% of AMD (shares wise) so they would be literally shooting themselves twice by not trying to save GloFlo. 

[MoonSpot]

A company does not need to be under financial duress in order to find reasons to offer early retirements for their more costly personnel.  All it takes is an corporate HR person to want to increase revenue, profit and longer term sustainability of the company(or more likely to get a fatter pay bonus for management types).

Regardless, without an actual financial analysis it is quite the leap to make to proclaim that they've noteworthy capital concerns based on putting some of their personnel out to pasture.  As they've appeared to have singled out their US plants for these offers, I'd say they're simply acting upon productivity metrics and their costs here.  The expressed misgivings over retiring and possible layoffs of Americans I'd assume to be the A-typical PR lip-service.

Not that I've looked in to this, just the way things usually seem to go.  I expect to jobs to move overseas.

[nephilim2]

4 hours ago, Sakkura said:

Chips can be dual sourced. Apple A9 was.

Yes, with 2 different designs that were built simultaneously ahead of time.

[nephilim2]

4 hours ago, Tomsen said:

The cost is higher than anticipated, but nothing outright alarming. The biggest issue is getting the price per wafer down to an economical level in a short timespan in regards to the process nodes lifetime.

 

For example is intel 14nm. Prices wasn't alarming, it was the time for how long it took for the prices to get down to economical levels. (which is probably why we see its lifetime extended).

 

In my point of view, Intel didn't push outright performances, but instead invested in other metrics (such as power-consumption/heat-output, die-size, IC integration, unify IC across markets, etc). If we only look at maximum performance (excluding SIMD) performance hasn't changed much from sandy-bridge, but given any of the other metrics, skylake/kaby-lake is pulling much further ahead.

 

It is a matter of investment prioritizations.

 

Which isn't cheap. You have to validated the mask for both foundries. Which was exactly his point.

Integer performance has doubled since SB. That was the core purpose of AVX2.

[Tomsen]

30 minutes ago, nephilim2 said:

Integer performance has doubled since SB. That was the core purpose of AVX2.

Which is why I excluded such extension in my comment. How did you miss that?

[Okjoek]

On 4/12/2017 at 4:41 AM, zMeul said:

if GloGo goes bust, it's going to be really bad for AMD

I thought FloFo needed AMD more than the other way around. Wasn't AMD forced by some contracts or something forcing AMD to buy from them?

[nephilim2]

19 minutes ago, Tomsen said:

Which is why I excluded such extension in my comment. How did you miss that?

shrugs*

 

Also, there are still very significant performance differences elsewhere even when you normalize the clocks.

[nephilim2]

11 minutes ago, Okjoek said:

I thought FloFo needed AMD more than the other way around. Wasn't AMD forced by some contracts or something forcing AMD to buy from them?

Abu Dhabi, to keep their investments afloat. Abu Dhabi has significant stakes in both companies.

[zMeul]

4 hours ago, Okjoek said:

I thought FloFo needed AMD more than the other way around. Wasn't AMD forced by some contracts or something forcing AMD to buy from them?

no one if forcing anyone - AMD made a choice to stick with GloFo

IBM are the ones with a contract to source from Glofo through 2025 (if I recall)