Remember, Raja Koduri, the ultimate leader of the now dissolved Radeon Technology Group (RTG) said Navi is a 7nm part. Fudzilla and a few industry sources we consulted are very confident that 7nm won't happen for GPUs in 2018.
The only 7nm you will see in 2018 will come from Qualcomm, Apple and Samsung and it will target phones and eventually tablets and later Windows on ARM PCs.
AMD’s new_chip.gfx10.mmSUPER_SECRET.enable [0: 0] is most likely a Vega on 8th Generation Core that will target the Core H processors in early 2018. We don’t have confirmation, but this makes a lot of sense as Intel used to call its Graphics core GFX. Here is an example with Lenovo drivers. That's what we at Fudzilla wrote about Navi time to market back in September 2016. Even then it was obvious that it would take quite some time until we saw it on the market.
7nm GPUs are 2019
Most of our colleagues want AMD to have graphics success in 2018 and we don’t blame them, but the manufacturing process is what is holding the GPU industry hostage. Nvidia is using 12nm, a marketing term for its optimized 16nm FinFET manufacturing for its latest and biggest ever processor called NV100. AMD is using GlobalFoundries 14nm for its Vega GPUs.
Gregg Bartlett, Senior vice president of the CMOS Business Unit at GlobalFoundries said: “Our 7nm FinFET technology development is on track and we are seeing strong customer traction, with multiple product tapeouts planned in 2018,”. “And, while driving to commercialize 7nm, we are actively developing next-generation technologies at 5nm and beyond to ensure our customers have access to a world-class roadmap at the leading edge.”
This is the official quote from mid-June 2017. If you plan to tape out something in 2018, you are far from mass production, it is as simple as that. What gets taped in 2018 will most likely ship in 2019. Then again, we said this in September 2016.
