AMD has Radeon Instinct accelerator with 7nm GPU working in lab

AMD has a Radeon Instinct accelerator with a GPU made at 7nm by TSMC working in its lab. The company says it is on track with plans to ship Instinct accelerators made at 7nm to customers this year.

Radeon Instinct Accelerator

AMD mentions the Radeon Instinct card with 7nm GPU in the discussion of its quarterly figures and also briefly reports the news fact in a tweet. AMD will not disclose specific details about the Radeon Instinct accelerator with 7nm GPU. The company only states that it has a working copy in its lab. The Instinct cards are optimized for machine learning, but use the same GPUs as the Radeon RX video cards for gamers.

The 7nm GPU is probably a Navi GPU, which is the successor to Vega. Last year there were already rumors that AMD would announce a card with Navi GPU on 7nm around August 2018. The GPU on the card in the lab is made on the 7nm process of TSMC, AMD CEO Lisa Su confirms when discussing the quarterly figures. Su says AMD will have the first-generation 7nm products made at both TSMC and GlobalFoundries.

Chip manufacturer TSMC announced earlier this week that it has started mass production of 7nm chips. It also indicated that among the tape-outs are GPUs. In addition to AMD, Nvidia also has GPUs made at TSMC.

Furthermore, Lisa Su says AMD will start sending samples of Zen 2-based processors to customers later this year. These are new Ryzen processors that are also made on the 7nm process. Processors based on the Zen 2 architecture will go into production in 2019.

AMD achieved good financial results in the past quarter. Revenue came in at $1.65 billion, 40 percent more than a year ago. At the bottom of the line, $81 million in profit remained. AMD lost $17 million in the same quarter a year ago.