Today we are all waiting for the Intel ER tomorrow. There are many articles to go over!
AMD’s JV with THATIC/Sugon so far has been a mystery. This post is from Reddit AMD_Insight, run by user kd-_. There are articles from http://guba.eastmoney.com which were translated by user ryanmononoke. Thanks to them for finding and translating these articles!
Sugon apparently had increased their stake and AMD should benefit from this JV. So far, AMD has received IP payments, but no royalty from Dyanna production. However, we do know that back in November 2018 a Sugon PreExabyte system made No. 38 on the top500 list, using Dyanna CPUs. I for one will be looking for royalty payment from Sugon/THATIC in 2019 very closely.
https://www.top500.org/system/179593
Rumor or not, this can only be good that AMD can move to 5 nm and be able to use both Samsung and TSMC.
https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20190122VL201.html
From the above article:
TSMC CEO CC Wei disclosed at the company’s recent investors meeting that the foundry is scheduled to start taping out 5nm chip designs later in the first half of 2019. TSMC is on track to move its 5nm process incorporating EUV lithography technology to volume production in the first half of 2020, according to Wei.
“All applications that are using 7nm today will adopt 5nm,” said Wei. “We expect more applications in HPC to adopt N5.” TSMC regards its 5nm process, dubbed N5, as a long-lived node, same as its 7nm.
This is excellent!
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ryzen-amd-third-gen-7nm-processor,38474.html
According to this interview, AMD CTO Papermaster said that 3rd Gen Ryzen core complex design will not require new optimization, which means adoption should be fast, unlike when 1st gen Ryzen was introduced there were teething pain with the new Ryzen architecture.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-winner-of-the-next-console-generation-AMD.397166.0.html
More speculation about PS% and next gen XBOX using the Gonzalo APU with 8 cores which will be 7 nm Zen 2 as leaked by TUM_APISAK on Twitter. The consensus is 2020, but there is no indication that it can’t be holidays 2019?
https://www.gamersnexus.net/news-pc/3429-hw-news-ryzen-3000-pcie-4-dram-prices
DRAM price is down, which is good for AMD I think. Nvidia says because they did not ship new GPU into the channel, that the crypto overhang is now gone. 10-series inventory in the channel is nearly all gone. I wonder how much Nvidia is holding in their own inventory, to be reported next Q?
https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20190123PD207.html
Server-use PCB shipments to see stable growth in 2019: Relatively stable demand for servers is likely to become the only major growth driver for PCB makers in 2019. This is good for Epyc/Rome.
Comments made by CC Wei (TSMC CEO), especially regarding Samsung and 5 nm.
Bottom line: I don’t think this year will be as bad for the semiconductor industry as some are predicting. We absolutely got ahead of ourselves with the last two double digit growth years and 1H 2019 will be the correction. But moving forward I too see great promise in 5G and AI for companies making chips, absolutely.
AMDinvestorblog 