Llano in short supply

AMD is struggling with Llano production. Its primary producer, Global Foundries is struggling to achieve big enough yields to meet this years consumer demand. Digitimes claims that supply will not pick up until the next generation of Trinity APUs arrives next year. The main concern for AMD is even though the Llano is a design break through in both the desktop and notebook markets, because they cannot meet high levels of production they cannot dominate the market or reduce costs through increased production.

Instead of slowing down future projects to ramp up production of Llano AMD is pressing ahead with the trinity APUs which are to feature 32nm Piledriver cores and 40nm Northern Islands VLIW4 Radeon cores. They should bring a lot more performance and hopefully better production yields. Fear not however as AMD is planning to continue with Llano even when Trinity arrives and will step up production of both, the main issue here is the 32nm CPU process which is not yielding as well as it could. For Trinity, AMD will use TSMC’s (and some help from Samsung) 28nm graphical manufacturing process along with the same Global Foundries 32nm CPU process which is not yielding very well.

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