AMD Cancelled Project Skybridge Because Global Foundries Terminated 20nm BULK - Italian Publication

Project Skybridge was announced approximately a year ago and was as aggressive as whatever project. AMD planned to combine x86 and ARM in a common platform but come up this part Analyst 24-hour interval Briefing and the projection was officially declared dead. Today, a report published past the Italian publication Bitsandchips.information technology claims that the reason AMD pulled th plug on Skybridge was because Global Foundry canceled its 20nm process.

AMD Project Skybridge APU SOC A slide from an one-time AMD slide deck. @AMD Public Domain

AMD's Skybridge was cancelled because of economic infeasibility afterward termination of GloFo's 20nm Majority process

The Project Skybridge was AMD'due south side by side generation ambidextrous calculating architecture that allowed x86 Cores and ARM cores to exist pin-to-pin compatible. The Project Sky-Bridge featured a new family unit of APUs and SOCs based on the low-power 20nm Cortex A57 cores with AMD's GCN core architecture. Basically, the Projection SkyBridge allowed these low-power ARM based SOCs to run on the same motherboards equally the x86 depression-power SOCs which were going to characteristic AMD'due south Puma+ cores. Theses ARM SOCs would too have been among the offset to feature total support for Android Os platform (something AMD hasn't achieved till at present).

The report past the Italian publication claims that the reasons for the cancellation of Skybridge were not and so uncomplicated as only lack of involvement - rather economics played an important part. Considering the 20nm Bulk process of Global Foundries was cancelled, AMD had the choice to either redesign the platform to the 28HP GloFo node or the 20SOC TSMC node - both of which were going to incur boosted costs, further decreasing the hazard of turn a profit, something that AMD was vary of later on so many quarters of losses. Samsung wasn't really an option but I would like to point out that fifty-fifty they have cancelled their 20nm low ability process.

Skybridge was valiant effort to unify the x86 and ARM platforms but AMD'southward financial troubles are conspicuously taking quite the toll on the development of its IP. With Skybridge AMD had been planning to finally dive into the mobile market properly (Android support). Ofcourse, since AMD has exited the microserver marketplace, Skybridge would probably have been cancelled either mode. The termination of Skybridge didn't, however, come every bit a surprise - since AMD has been mostly silent about information technology since launching information technology those 12 months back.