Published in PC Hardware

AMD working on 7nm 48 core processor

by on20 June 2016


Exclusive: Codename Starship

Fudzilla warned you that AMD's 32core / 64 tread X86 processor codenamed Naples is coming in 2017 to a server near you, but it looks like AMD has a 7nm product called Starship which will arrive soon afterwards. 

Naples, named after a city famous for its bottlenecks and drivers that explode for no apparent reason, uses 14nm FinFET and has 32 cores and 64 thread processors.  After AMD has got that out of the way, it is not going to 10nm, but will go for 7nm. This is quite an aggressive roadmap. The 7nm flavour will be codenamed Starship, presumably after the 1980s band which had a rather hopeful hit "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now"

This server chip will have 48 cores and 96 thread support. There will be versions with fewer cores that will make it into mainstream servers and desktop computers.

Starship is still a concept project and if all goes well, you might see it as soon as 2018. When a company tells you it is doing something for 2018, this probably means late 2018, but it still sounds rather impressive.

This means that GlobalFoundries will be ready to launch its 7nm at that time, as we expect that the Zen successor to be another GlobalFoundries product.

There will be versions of Starship with TDPs between 35 and 180W, for the whole range of higher end servers. Let's hope that Starship makes it on time, as this would probably mean that a 7nm Zen desktop CPUs will not be more than 18-24 months away.

 

Last modified on 20 June 2016
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