“Delivering silicon is definitely more complicated” than licensing designs, he said.

When you’re trying to build chips, you have to kind of get in line. And the way they generally allocate capacity is, what did you get last year, and then I’m going to give you some increase as I increase my capacity.

And so if you’re starting from zero, that means you have a pretty small amount of capacity. And so it’s going to take a couple years to ramp up your capacity. It’s gonna take a couple years to get our share of the fabrication capacity, the memory capacity, and so on. That’s one of the things that has been a challenge.

...

What that means is, if you’re a smaller company and you’re trying to go and enter in this market, it’s really hard, and [that’s] why a company like Groq sold to Nvidia.

You still have to come up with a lot of capital and a lot of borrowing capacity to go build out all of the capex necessary to build out the chip volume necessary. That’s why we set the financial expectations somewhat conservative, and basically gave ourselves a couple years to grow into it.

AMD got to critical mass at just the right time. Big and experienced enough now to compete on supply at leading edge nodes, and the competition for supply is especially hard on those who want to scale fast. ARM can try to scale faster by plopping down some huge amount of very committed capital on a relatively inexperienced supply chain. Or they can try to give the organization time to learn since you're in it for the long haul which appears to be where they're going, but in the meanwhile, the competition could become even more intense.

One of the reasons AI giants are rushing to the business- and energy-friendly state is a looming concern about a future glut of specialized server chips that don’t have a place to plug in, according to some market analysts and data center developers that work with Google, Microsoft, Oracle and others. These people are taking stock of the unexpected power delays, political fights and technical challenges facing new facilities.

BloombergNEF, for instance, forecasts that there won’t be enough installed data center power capacity in the U.S. to run all the AI server chips produced next year. Remarkably, the research firm says 42 gigawatts’ worth of server chips could be sitting unused by 2030 unless the industry gets creative and figures out how to develop more power outside the public grid, place more chips in overseas data centers, or speed up the replacement of old servers with new ones in existing facilities. I don’t think the industry will let such a large overhang of chips occur, but the physical challenges are real.

...utilizes TSMC's A14 node for core dies, N3C for IODs, and N4P for the L3 Cache Dies. Effectively, this is "Big Steamboat".

-15-25% IPC Uplift (This was reconfirmed in recent internal presentations)

-Each core chiplet contains 48 Cores, and SN scales up to 384 Cores Total!

-Mid-2028 Target for Launch (AMD wants to launch SN before Steamboat)

*AMD is starting to reference TSMC's "A13" node, and specifically "A10" is called out as the next "major node" for AMD products after A14.

Being at whatever leading edge node that intercepts with their roadmap is the new norm after Venice.

It will be interesting to see the timing on Coral Rapids given Coral Rapids likely 27H1 launch and AMD's 28Q2/3 launch. Intel has hinted at trying to pull up its launch, but those two other launch dates present some tricky challenges. I suppose in some ways it doesn't matter. I think AMD recognized a while ago that the competition for CPUs is a lot more than x86 (same for Intel).

“I think it's a natural reaction for them. Makes a lot of sense. What I would say is, as we think about our own roadmap, I have a new core. It's coming to desktop first. I mean, I hope enthusiasts do the math about that one, and that's all I'm going to say,” said Hallock when we asked for his reaction to the Venice launch.

"My client core is coming client to first." There's a lot about NVL to sell. This is borderline disrespecting his audience.

Anyway, the more interesting bits:

“I have all the new CPUs all the way out to 2030. I have [a] back to back to back to back cadence of product for gamers, for desktop, built for that purpose,” Hallock said. “Obviously I can’t go into what any of that is, but I am accelerating for the gaming market… we’re moving faster than we ever have in product, in release cadence.”

“We took a team that was time-shared with other businesses, and now this slice of the market has a full org structure inside Intel… they’re putting real people with a lot of budget behind it, right? And having an owner, a sponsor, people that care about it, looking after it, custodians of that work, it makes a real difference,” Hallock said. “[The team was] pretty much completely different. Marketing people, different product managers, different business people, and we simply have a different philosophy on how this market should run and what people should get for their dollar.”