Quote Originally Posted by Heinz68 View Post
Any links about that, I can't Google any but there are plenty reports about TSMC 32nm cancellation. Personally I believe TSMC cancelled the node because of so much problem with 40nm and GLobalFoundries announcing to work on 28nm.

The bottom line is, if GLobalFoundries got successful 28nm process against the TSMC 32nm than TSMC could have even loose the Nvidia business. They sure could not afford that.

Here is what AMD Vice President and General Manager of AMD's GPU Division said according to bit-tech

I don't think Skynner lied about it, after all they still need TSMC

EDIT
If TSMC cancelled the 32nm because of AMD, why wouldn't the TSMC say so? Or did they? If they did that sure is a big new news.
No one outright lies in this industry but PR is all about selective truth telling...and of course a fair amount of embellishment by certain publications in order to give a certain voice to articles.

TSMC cancelled their 32nm process. Why should anyone need to know more? Even the shareholders usually get a warmed-over version. There are so many stories within stories that the real truth is hardly ever so simple.

I am not saying that AMD's dropping of their lower-end 32nm cards was the end-all for 32nm but rather one of the main contributing factors to TSMC's re-evaluation of their roadmap.

In the past, it has been ATI's cards that have very much been route proving products for TSMC's High Performance lines. We saw this with 40nm, 55nm, etc. The manufacturing relationship between ATI (now AMD) and TSMC allowed for a mutually beneficial roll-out procedure that ended up benefiting clients like NVIDIA as well.

So yeah, there were probably other economic factors behind TSMC's shutting down 32nm fabrication before it even started producing anything past test wafers. However, loosing high volume parts from a major client likely had a massive impact.

Quote Originally Posted by Solus Corvus View Post
Like Heinz68, I am curious about this. Is this something AMD told you?

In your 6970 review you said AMD had taped out some of the new architecture products before deciding against using 32nm for all of them. So they had some products for this arch taped out before ~Nov'09? That seems like a really long time.

Regardless of what certain outlets state, an initial tape-out usually happens 9-12 months (or even more) before volume production. And yes, I can state that my conversations with AMD covered the points above and then some. Some I can discuss, most I can't.