We have mentioned in the Podcast and on the front page that GLOBALFOUNDRIES 32nm process has been having some problems.  Poor yields have prevented AMD from hitting the targets that they wanted to see from Llano thought they still produce enough to sell.  The supply is enough to keep up with the demands of the individual DIY system builders but AMD really wants major laptop and system vendors to pick up Llano as a base for new models.  Since they want to order very large numbers of APUs at the same time, until Llano can reliably be available for bulk purchases AMD’s new APU is not terribly attractive to those vendors.  Why is the Llano having such troubles? Check out Charlie’s theory over at SemiAccurate.

"Global Foundries is having the proverbial ‘issues’ with their high end 32nm-SHP process. The knee-jerk reaction is to kick GloFo for the problems, but that doesn’t take in to account the good partss of the process.

To say this story is complex and nuanced is putting things mildly. The 32nm-SHP process is the first foundry process to ship High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) chips, and it is the first foundry to ship customer products on a sub-40nm process. They are also the only foundry shipping HKMG products with strain, aka a SiGe cap. That is the hard part, compared to strain, the rest of the HKMG process is easy. The fact that AMD has shipped almost 10 million Llano CPUs by now says that something is going right. GloFo is currently making things that no one else can, and with a 6+ month lead on the competition."

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