AMD EPYC CPUs Are Helping TSMC Manufacturer Next-Generation Chips Faster

TSMC or Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Company has announced that it is now using AMD’s EPYC CPUs to manufacture brand new and next-generation chips. The world’s largest chip manufacturer is relying on AMD’s EPYC line of chips which offers a clear advantage over previous implementations.

TSMC Is Now Powered By AMD’s EPYC CPUs To Help Manufacturer Chips Faster & Efficiently

As per TSMC’s director on infrastructure, each automation machine needs to have access to one x86 server to control the operation speed, provision of water, electricity & gas (power input). The company is making full use of AMD’s EPYC CPUs to power these machines which are designing the current and next-generation chips for consumers and HPC powerhouses.

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“We first introduced AMD EPYC processors into the general workload,” explains Simon Wang, Director of Infrastructure and Communication Services Division at TSMC, “and they are being deployed with our research and development team.” TSMC was looking for a server solution optimized to implement hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) design where all three components — compute, storage, and networking — could be provided by the same underlying hardware.

Although TSMC is the company that manufactures AMD’s technology-leading 7nm products, which includes the groundbreaking AMD EPYC, Ryzen, and Ryzen Threadripper processors, as well as the AMD Radeon, Radeon Pro, and AMD Instinct GPUs, it didn’t mean that AMD EPYC processors were automatically going to be the preferred selection.

AMD’s EPYC CPUs are now being used to manufacture chips at TSMC.

For a while now, TSMC was relying on the HPE DL32G 510 platform for general workloads. The HPE system comprises a 2nd Gen AMD EPYC Rome 7702P CPU which features 64 cores and a total 128 threads. The chip clocks at a 2 GHz base frequency and 3.35 GHz boost clock. TSMC has also made expansions to its manufacturing teams which are relying on the high-frequency (HF) EPYC CPUs like the EPYC 7F72 which feature 24 cores, 48 threads, and a base clock of 3.2 GHz. A single-socket AMD EPYC CPU features 128 PCIe Gen 4 lanes so that doesn’t compromise on the IO capabilities of the platform.

“For automation with the machinery inside our fab, each machine needs to have one x86 server to control the operation speed and provision of water, electricity and gas, or power consumption,” adds Wang.

These machines are very costly. They might cost billions of dollars, but the servers that control them are much cheaper. I need to make sure that we have high availability in case one rack is down, then we can use another rack to support the machine. With a standard building block, I can generate about 1,000 virtual machines, which can control 1,000 fab tools in our cleanroom.” This will mean a huge cost saving without sacrificing failover redundancy or reliability.

Utilizing AMD EPYC chips, TSMC states that the higher memory density is a clear advantage for the EPYC Rome chips. The system can also generate about 1000 virtual machines with a standard block which is very impressive. This marks a big win for AMD’s EPYC CPUs in powering the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturing company.



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