AMD to Launch Next-Gen Greenland on 14nm in Summer 2016

AMD has largely been building off of GCN since its initial debut in 2011, with incremental improvements  made via GCn 1.1 and 1.2. Combined with the limitations of having to use the 28nm process, the GPU space hasn’t seen any great gains of late. However, that is set to change soon with the arrival of AMD’s new Greenland and Nvidia’s Pascal architectures. We’re now getting some information that Greenland will launch in Summer 2016 and what’s more, jump straight to 14nm.

Greenland was rumoured to use the 14nm process from Samsung/Globalfoundries, eschewing the 16nm from TSMC, their usual supplier. If this is the case, AMD and Nvidia’s cards will not only have different architectures but finally different process nodes. Greenland manufacturing is to begin in June with the launch to be held sometime in late summer, in time for the back to school and holiday sales.

AMD had previously confirmed that the 14nm process would be used for GPUs but this is a major change in strategy. Globalfoundries and Samsung are also expected to use the 14nm process to make AMD’s next-gen Zen CPU as well. From an integration standpoint, it does make it easier for AMD to produce APUs since both the CPU and GPU will target the same node. Combined with HBM2, next years GPU and CPU launches should be pretty eventful.