During AMD's earnings call, CEO Lisa Su revealed, that in 2016 AMD is going to release its first products, which will be manufactured using the new 14/16nm FinFET process technology. The products to benefit from the new process technology are the upcoming Zen CPUs and Arctic Islands GPUs.

Apparently Su didn't disclose which are the first products to be based on the 14/16nm FinFET process technology. Nevertheless she mentioned that AMD's next generation processors and graphics cards will make use of the new process technology. Therefore it's reasonable to assume that the Zen CPUs and Arctic Islands graphics cards will be manufactured using the new process.

Su was also keen on mentioning that process technology itself is only a tool to make a great product. What the engineers are going to craft with such a tool that is another question. It's certainly great to have a competitive toolset, but still it's most critical what AMD's engineers are going to make with this tool.

It would be the first time in a decade, that AMD was able to deploy products, which use competitive process technology. This would put the company on par with Intel in this regard, since Intels Kaby Lake processors will be base on a comparable process.

2016 is most certainly going to be a very interesting year for AMD. So far they seem to be confident that their Zen architecture is going to perform well, promising up to 40 percent increased IPC (instructions per clock) performance compared to the Excavator microarchitecture.

We, and many others would certainly love to see AMD become competitive again and a new, powerful desktop CPU is really the one thing AMD needs to have in its portfolio to score a success.




Source: WCCFTech