According to a report from Tom’s Hardware, AMD’s CEO, Lisa Su, is planning to go to Taiwan in the next few months. She is reportedly planning to meet with several partners in Taiwan, such as Asus, Acer and perhaps more importantly ASMedia (Xiang Shuo Technology), as it will become AMD’s only chipset manufacturer once the X570 chipset is discontinued.
AMD apparently doesn’t forget to maintain good relationships with various lesser-known partners that supply components for its CPUs, such as Nanya PCB, Shin Hsing Electronics, and King Seok Technology.
However, it seems that the main reason for Su’s own visit to Taiwan was to meet with TSMC to discuss future cooperation with TSMC’s CEO, Chieh-Chih Wei. This is to enable AMD to get sufficient wafer allocation for future nodes such as its 3nm and 2nm class nodes. For AMD, the move to these nodes will not happen anytime soon, but given that TSMC is currently the leading foundry and operates at capacity, it makes sense to force an early takeover, as there is fierce competition among chipmakers to get wafer allocations for cutting-edge nodes.
It’s unclear which exact 3nm-class node AMD will target, but it could be the N3P node, which TSMC is said to be starting production sometime next year. In terms of advanced packaging involving AMD products, Suzy also met with TSMC, SPIL and Sunrise Semiconductor, and the products involved include technologies such as chip-on-a-substrate (CoWoS) and fan-out embedded bridge (FO-EB), which AMD is already expected to use in its upcoming Navi 3x GPUs.
