AMD began as an integrated design manufacturer competing directly with Intel - meaning they
designed and made their own chips.
When the company's internal manufacturing operations started to lag behind Intel, the
company transitioned into being a fabless manufacturer.
Even after the transition, its foundry partner GlobalFoundries struggled to keep up with
the company's technical and yield demands.
Eventually the company would turn to the Taiwanese giant TSMC for its leading edge processes.
Today, TSMC is AMD's closest foundry partner and the manufacturer of some of its best products.
In the video, we will look at the chip designer's move away from its manufacturing roots, its
up-and-down relationship with GlobalFoundries, and how it came to fab its most advanced products
at TSMC.
By the late 2000s, AMD needed help.
They turned losses for over two years starting in 2006.
And the company's products were losing ground to Intel and the Core microprocessor architecture.
This was despite a number of successful anti-trust suits against Intel targeting its anticompetitive
practices.
Intel continued to lead its smaller rival in technological prowess and product category
dominance.
In 2007, AMD's first quad-core chip offering codenamed Barcelona lagged its Intel competitor
to the market by nine months.
The late release - and the product's subsequent tepid cost-performance offering - squandered
an opportunity to grow its 20%-ish market share.
Intel seemed to be firing on all cylinders.
It announced that all of its foundries had moved from a 65nm to 45nm process, a year
ahead of AMD.
Beyond that, Intel said that its 32nm and 22nm processes would roll out in their usual
2-year cadence.
This model put AMD at even more of a disadvantage, as they had to keep up and leading-edge foundries
were getting increasingly expensive.
As an IDM that did both the design and manufacturing, AMD needed to spend millions of dollars building
fabs.
It needed sales or sales commitments from potential customers to get that money.
But those potential customers won’t make those commitments if they feel that the fab
won’t be delivered on time.
The result was a chicken and egg dilemma that left AMD in a downward spiral.
Even with generous tax breaks coming from Germany for building its Fabs 30 and 36 in
Dresden, the company had to halt construction of those Dresden fabs as well as a few New
York fabs to conserve cash.
In October 2008, AMD announced that they would be spinning their manufacturing fabs off into
a separate company.
Hector Ruiz, AMD's second CEO, exited after seven consecutive quarterly losses.
The spinoff would allow AMD to focus on being a fabless company and get a capital injection.
The emirate of Abu Dhabi came in as that white-horse investor.
They had already bought 8% of the company in 2007 as part of an earlier deal.
Now they were moving to get more involved.
The spinoff would have Abu Dhabi paying $700 million for 55% of the new FoundryCo (later
to be named GlobalFoundries) and another $300 million to raise their ownership share of
AMD to 19.3%.
The country continues to be a major shareholder in AMD, with 6.9% ownership share as of this
writing.
The transaction was consummated in March 2009.
AMD owned 34% share in GlobalFoundries and became its first customer.
GlobalFoundries sought to become a leading player in the semiconductor space by consolidating
other foundries into a single major player that can challenge the current market leaders.
In acquiring their customers, the idea was that the company could pool together enough
capital to fund the research and development for future processes as well as the immense
capital expenditures to build fabs.
Six months later, Abu Dhabi took a step towards executing on that strategy by purchasing struggling
Singaporean player Chartered Semiconductor.
I did a video about them previously that you should check out.
The acquisition instantly made GlobalFoundries the third biggest foundry in the market.
Things seemed well.
In March 2009, GlobalFoundries struck what is called a wafer supply agreement that dictated
the terms of their relationship.
The agreement remains in force to this day, binding the two companies together.
But over the years, several significant amendments have been attached, progressively giving AMD
the freedom to pursue business with TSMC.
It should be noted that by then AMD and TSMC already had a working relationship.
In 2006, AMD purchased Canadian graphics chip maker ATI in a deal worth about $5.4 billion.
ATI had been one of TSMC's biggest customers, and that relationship continued for a few
years even after the merger.
So it would seem that AMD knows the benefits that going to TSMC might give them.
But the 2009 Wafer Agreement mandated that AMD purchase all of its products from GlobalFoundries.
The price at which these products would be sold was calculated on a cost-plus model,
the cost of the goods along with a percentage markup.
If GlobalFoundries was unable to meet AMD's volume demands though, AMD can bring in another
foundry to serve as a second source for a time.
To keep TSMC from being brought in as a second source, GlobalFoundries had to capably bring
its manufacturing processes to the leading edge, matching blows with Intel.
The key issue would be the development and rollout of its next generation process - 32nm.
They were failing at the task.
In 2010, just about a year into the new relationship, GlobalFoundries found itself seven or eight
quarters behind Intel.
Santa Clara had already successfully transitioned their fabs to a 32nm process, with 28nm on
track for 2012.
GlobalFoundries was still working out the kinks for 32nm, and the delays were hitting
AMD's product rollout.
In the 2Q 2010 earnings call, then-CEO Dirk Meyer said that due to "a slower than anticipated
progress of [the] 32nm yield curve", AMD had to delay its quad-core 32nm Llano APU product
a year to the second half of 2011.
To fill the void, AMD brought up the product rollout of its dual-core APU product Ontario.
(FYI, an APU is an AMD marketing term for a system on a chip die that included both
a CPU and GPU.
At the time, they made up a significant percentage of AMD's sales.)
Ontario was fabbed at TSMC at 40nm.
That node was a troubled one for TSMC.
Yes, TSMC is capable of having issues too.
Some reports claimed that the 40nm yields were as low as 20-30%.
The fiasco basically cost TSMC’s then-CEO Rick Tsai his job, as he was reassigned and
the octogenarian founder Morris Chang took over once more.
Despite AMD being affected by this - its Radeon series 5000 graphics cards were fabbed on
40nm - AMD still chose TSMC to make those Ontario chips.
GlobalFoundries at the time was digesting its Chartered Semiconductors acquisition and
did not have the capacity to handle the job.
So TSMC took over an AMD CPU product for the first time, poured $1.6 billion to increase
its factory capacity and Ontario shipped on time in January 2011.
Compared to how TSMC handled Ontario at 40nm, the GlobalFoundries 32nm delay was immensely
frustrating and AMD sought to keep it from happening again.
Thus in April 2011, a few months before the Llano APU launch, the two companies announced
changes to the Wafer Supply Agreement.
This new agreement changed the way AMD paid GlobalFoundries for one year.
Where before they used the aforementioned "cost plus" model to determine the wafer prices,
this new agreement changes it to where AMD would only pay for "good die".
So GlobalFoundries was incentivized to improve its yields otherwise it would be eating the
cost for bad wafers.
If the yields do improve then AMD would pay $400 million in bonus payments.
Again this would only be in effect for one year - presumably by then GlobalFoundries
would have their cards straight on 32nm.
It appears that the new wafer agreement cost GlobalFoundries quite dearly.
In Q3 2011, the foundry fired their CEO Doug Grose as well as a bunch of other senior people.
The company had eaten the costs for bad wafers all year long.
In 2012, just three years after the spinoff, AMD divested its final stake in GlobalFoundries,
granting the company full economic independence.
In the transaction, AMD gave GlobalFoundries $425 million and then amended its wafer agreement
once more so to allow AMD to temporarily fab some of their 28nm APU products at TSMC.
They never really gave a reason why.
My bet is because of capacity issues again from the Chartered acquisition.
Intel by now was already heading to 22nm with Ivy Bridge.
But things were starting to change.
In 2014 AMD appointed a new CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, and she began her tenure by emphasizing
the primacy of the technology.
AMD needed to have chips superior to Intel.
In order to do that, they needed access to the best process manufacturing technologies.
In order to diffuse immense and continually rising node development costs, GlobalFoundries
teamed up with South Korean giant Samsung Electronics.
They announced on April 2014 that they would work together to bring out their 14nm process
by the end of the year or later.
The collaboration with Samsung allowed GloFo to deliver their next generation 14nm node
on time in the first half of 2015.
And that got them the nod for AMD's Radeon RX 400 Series GPUs.
Released in June 2016, it was a good product that won awards for its cost-performance ratio.
And for what it is worth, GlobalFoundries' 14nm seemed to have yielded rather well for
its customers.
But AMD wanted more access to leading edge nodes.
So in August 2016 it went back to the Wafer Supply Agreement with GlobalFoundries and
amended it once more, its Sixth Amendment to the Agreement.
It first established that GlobalFoundries would remain the preferred supplier for the
next generation 7nm process.
The two companies will collaborate on fleshing out that process and getting it to work.
But at the same time, the amendment would allow AMD the possibility of pursuing 14nm
and 7nm process jobs with other foundries in exchange for financial considerations.
In other words, AMD would have to pay GloFo for the privilege of not using their process.
It is likely that AMD did this in case they would need to secure second-sourcing capability
for their ground-breaking Zen microarchitecture.
At this point, AMD was basically betting the company on Zen succeeding.
Failing because of a supply issue was unacceptable.
GloFo and Samsung continued their technology collaboration and that allowed GlobalFoundries
to announce its 12nm process in 2017 - an iterative improvement on the 14nm.
With these excellent, high quality nodes available to them, AMD would launch two generations
of Zen to great success.
Despite this successful launch, however, GlobalFoundries was starting to come to terms with its fate.
They had plenty of incentives for getting to 7nm, but the economics were getting increasingly
worse.
Going to 7nm means acquiring and mastering the next major paradigm in lithography: EUV.
For GlobalFoundries to get EUV to work, everything from the light source to the recipes had to
change - a retooling job that would probably cost tens of billions of dollars.
GloFo would have to find some way to get that kind of capital and its Middle East backers
had finally had enough.
And on the other side, just how many customers really needed EUV 7nm?
AMD would be the biggest, but other than that, you have just a few flagship big-market customers
like Apple, Nvidia, Bitmain, and Qualcomm.
Those are demanding, pain-in-the-butt customers and GlobalFoundries would have to compete
with TSMC and Samsung for them.
Why put in the pain and effort when there is plenty of business in other processes?
So in August 2018, two years into developing 7nm, the company announced that it was putting
development of that technology on hold.
Instead, it would focus on those two 14nm and 12nm processes - perfectly good for most
customers - as well as other speciality processes for niche markets.
With GloFo exiting the 7nm race, AMD needed a new foundry for its upcoming Zen 2 microarchitectures.
You see, this new Zen 2 product would be utilizing a brand new physical design paradigm as compared
to previous Zen generations.
They would be moving away from a single monolithic design to what is called a "chiplet" design
tying together several smaller dies.
Smaller dies have better yields and heat distribution.
It makes intuitive sense.
The bigger a die is, the more chances that mistakes and errors can happen.
Keeping it small means that you get more "good" chips from your foundry process.
So thus in January 2019, AMD and GlobalFoundries announced a seventh amendment to the wafer
supply agreement.
It allowed AMD full flexibility to purchase 7nm node and beyond without any one-time payments
or royalties.
It also set purchase commitments for GloFo's 12nm nodes and above - Zen 2 would still use
12nm for I/O die.
Since then, TSMC has been AMD's main foundry for its leading edge chiplet processors.
When Zen 3 was released nearly two years later, an enhanced version of TSMC 7nm and GlobalFoundries
14nm again fabbed the chip's die components.
TSMC also fabbed the chips for the latest Radeon RX series of graphics cards - codenamed
"Navi".
And TSMC's 5nm process is anticipated to fab AMD's upcoming next Zen 4 architecture, scheduled
to launch some time next year.
While there is some initial talk about AMD potentially second-sourcing with Samsung Foundry,
nothing has been announced and AMD remains one of TSMC's closest and most important partners.
Apple and Huawei almost always gets the leading edge for the first year or so, but AMD follows
thereafter.
AMD's path transitioning away from its own manufacturing to GlobalFoundries and then
to TSMC has been a rocky one.
I think it demonstrates the difficulty of the whole venture and why so many other companies
have dropped out in the race.
Now there are just three leading edge chip makers left, and just two of them do work
for other customers.
And for what it is worth, GlobalFoundries has not really looked back ever since the
7nm halt.
They seem to be doing well financially and on track for an eventual IPO.
There is a big lucrative business in serving customers looking for just-good-enough.
AMD's market share has returned to its highest levels since 2007, its products praised for
outperforming their Intel rivals.
Intel is starting to get itself unstuck after losing years to manufacturing delays at its
10nm and 7nm level.
AMD will continue to rely heavily on TSMC being able to produce enough acceptable leading
edge product to continue AMD's return from the brink.