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The rumors were that 5mn was going to take a lot of work and so AMD delayed until their following CPU architecture iteration Zen4. Now it seems more likely tha

The rumors were that 5mn was going to take a lot of work and so AMD delayed until their following CPU architecture iteration Zen4. Now it seems more likely that they were outbid by Apple which is why Zen3 is stuck on the older process. The risk for AMD is if they can get 5mn or equivalent from another fab for Zen4

SllX 6y ago
And that sucks for them at this point in time, but it’s just business, and business has risks. Apple does a lot to mitigate risks to their business, and if AMD really was outbid, then that just means AMD probably also tried to mitigate as much risk to their business as they could, but they clearly didn’t mitigate it enough. At this point in time, this is the situation, but no one here should expect this to remain the situation in perpetuity. From what I heard, prior to this, Apple and AMD were jointly buying up all of or almost all of TSMC’s 7nm fab capacity. AMD has risen from the the dirt, and then later again from the ashes and is presently making the best x86_64 chips you can buy today. I’m actually disappointed Apple didn’t try to shop around for the 2019 Mac Pro CPU because they could have gotten much better all-around parts buying the equivalents from AMD for less and with lower power consumption. Ah well, can’t win them all.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- happycube 6y ago
  I think Apple's playing a longer game - if they weren't planning to move to their own ARM cores, they could have designed custom SOCs with AMD ala the game consoles.
  - SllX 6y ago
    That’s fair enough, I figured by the time they were designing the Mac Pro they were already planning to move to ARM. Would have been nice to see EPYC in the 2019 model, but it is understandable why that didn’t happen.
- MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
  > with lower power consumption I‘m not sure that’s true. Afaik Intel parts still have a rather large advantage concerning idle power consumption.
  - SllX 6y ago
    You raise a good point and not one I considered.
gumby 6y ago
AMD spun out their foundries taking on this risk. And frankly it’s not much of a risk: they are selling as much as they can produce; going to a (currently) exclusive node wouldn’t help them at all.
ksec 6y ago
Zen 3 with 7nm has been on the roadmap for three years. It has nothing to do with 5nm, Apple, or not.

SllX 6y ago

And that sucks for them at this point in time, but it’s just business, and business has risks. Apple does a lot to mitigate risks to their business, and if AMD really was outbid, then that just means AMD probably also tried to mitigate as much risk to their business as they could, but they clearly didn’t mitigate it enough. At this point in time, this is the situation, but no one here should expect this to remain the situation in perpetuity. From what I heard, prior to this, Apple and AMD were jointly buying up all of or almost all of TSMC’s 7nm fab capacity. AMD has risen from the the dirt, and then later again from the ashes and is presently making the best x86_64 chips you can buy today. I’m actually disappointed Apple didn’t try to shop around for the 2019 Mac Pro CPU because they could have gotten much better all-around parts buying the equivalents from AMD for less and with lower power consumption. Ah well, can’t win them all.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
happycube 6y ago
I think Apple's playing a longer game - if they weren't planning to move to their own ARM cores, they could have designed custom SOCs with AMD ala the game consoles.
- SllX 6y ago
  That’s fair enough, I figured by the time they were designing the Mac Pro they were already planning to move to ARM. Would have been nice to see EPYC in the 2019 model, but it is understandable why that didn’t happen.
MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
> with lower power consumption I‘m not sure that’s true. Afaik Intel parts still have a rather large advantage concerning idle power consumption.
- SllX 6y ago
  You raise a good point and not one I considered.

gumby 6y ago

AMD spun out their foundries taking on this risk. And frankly it’s not much of a risk: they are selling as much as they can produce; going to a (currently) exclusive node wouldn’t help them at all.

ksec 6y ago

Zen 3 with 7nm has been on the roadmap for three years. It has nothing to do with 5nm, Apple, or not.