AMD Radeon HD6950/6970(Cayman) Reviews

[SKYMTL]

The bottom line is, if there was no issue with the 32nm process, Cayman would be a little beast, actually the same applies to Bart.

That's untrue. We're talking about economies of scale when it comes to the 32nm manufacturing process. There wasn't a large client to pick it up so it was dropped in favor of concentrating on 28nm.

As I have said numerous times already: AMD realized that 32nm wouldn't bring them any benefits in terms of power savings or cost offsets for their mid and lower end cards so decided to port them over to 40nm instead. That left Ibiza dangling at the top end but without large volumes running through their foundries on the 32nm process, TSMC decided to drop the process altogether. This is also why we didn't see Cayman until December of this year.

I'm not saying TSMC wouldn't have had issues with manufacturing. Rather, they weren't given the chance to actually run into any of the pitfalls since designs were stopped before volume production commenced.

I don't need links or anything else to back this up since I was told it first-hand.

Basically what you're arguing is which came first: the chicken or the egg. I mean naturally TSMC was behind on the 32nm process but that didn't mean they COULDN'T produce a lineup of products based off of it.