United Microelectronics Corporation has announced that they have entered volume production for the Through-Silicon-Via technology (TSV). This is the process used to manufacture the AMD Radeon R9 Fury X GPU.

It looks like AMD has started to work closer with UMC. Bryan Black, senior fellow at AMD said, "UMC's long track record of bringen innovative technologies from the R&D stage to volume production for customer products was a compelling reason for us to engage with them as our foundry for the interposer and associated TSV technology. They have again proven their ability to execute successfully with TSV on our latest high-performance GPU, and we are pleased to have them as a valuable supply-chain partner for our exciting new line of Radeon products".

The past generations of AMD GPUs have all been manufactured at TSMC. It's really interesting to see that AMD has started collaborating with UMC on their new Radeon R9 Fury X chips. Such a move could have several reasons. It could for example be that TSMC doens't have enough capacity or it could also be that the yield for AMDs new Fury X chips is very low. What could also be possible is that AMD is bringing offers in to have semiconductors compete on manufacturing their GPUs in order to push the price down. In fact, a closer collaboration with UMC could imply loads of things and we're rather sure to soon read some weird rumors on this matter as well.




Source: UMC