Confirmed: GlobalFoundries will manufacture AMD's mobile, low-power Polaris GPUs

When AMD unveiled its new Polaris architecture, there was still some question as to where the new graphics processors would be built. Historically, AMD has built GPUs with TSMC and used GlobalFoundries for its CPUs and higher-end APUs, which use integrated graphics. GlobalFoundries has now officially confirmed that this is changing at 14nm. In a statement, the company said it will fab cards based on Polaris for a number of applications and scenarios, "including thin and light gaming notebooks, small form factor desktops, and discrete graphics cards with lower power demands."

This appears to confirm our previous hypothesis: AMD is tapping GF to fab its mobile designs and low-power desktop cards, but building higher-power architectures with TSMC. This also makes sense given what we know about the two foundries' respective processes: GF's technology is based on Samsung's 14nm LPP (Low Power Process), and while it can perform some customization work to validate higher TDPs, AMD's Zen CPUs are expected to top out around 95W TDP. GPUs, in contrast, can reach much higher values. It's not uncommon for high-end graphics cards to hit 250W, and ultra-high-end cards can break 300W.

GlobalFoundries is claiming that its new process will deliver up to 50% gains in performance and 65% reduction in total power consumption. AMD's graph (pictured below), showed much smaller gains -- but AMD's data may have been a best-fit line to cover its entire set of products and not specific to either foundry. We saw earlier this year that Apple's Samsung hardware was significantly smaller than what TSMC was building, but also drew more power under heavy use.

Then again, both the silicon and the time frames involved are significantly different. It's entirely possible that the 14nm issues that caused Samsung-built parts to draw more power than their TSMC equivalents have been resolved already, or that the nature of the issue was unique to the Apple A9 SoC rather than a function of the intrinsic process node. AMD has already forecast that Polaris will emphasize reducing power and improving efficiency; clearly the company believes it can hit those goals working with GlobalFoundries' 14nm LPP.