Talking to the assembled throngs at the Global Foundries Technology Conference, Papermaster said the company will transition both Vega GPUs and the Ryzen line of processors to the 12nm LP process.

What was unclear from the announcement is if the 12nm LP will be a shrink of Ryzen in 2018 or if Zen+/Zen 2 will also be using the 12LP process. So far AMD has hinted that Zen 2 will use the 7nm process, but this has been confusing because the outfit has used both "Zen+" and "Zen 2" to refer to its next-generation die.

At least one thing is clear from the announcement. The transition to 12nm LP shows that AMD is still very much in bed with Global Foundries. There has been mutterings that AMD might seek other partners for its forthcoming product generations, despite signing a five-year wafer supply agreement recently.

Tom's Hardware pointed out that Nvidia’s Volta architecture is already shipping on TSMC’s 12nm FFN process this year, so on the GPU side Nvidia seems to be ahead on adopting new process technology right now. Of course, on the CPU side we also have Intel, which promised “real” 10nm chips for next year that should also be significantly ahead in performance and power efficiency compared to the 12LP process.