AMD Latest News & Update: Secret Technology Stolen As Radeon RX Vega Goes Limited Supply Due To Low HBM2 Production

AMD and Nvidia tech secrets have allegedly been stolen by a former TSMC engineer and sold to a Chinese competitor, HLMC. Incidentally, TSMC is among the biggest processor makers, along with Intel and Samsung.

According to reports, AMD details, including secret materials that are related to TSMC's 28nm manufacturing process were stolen by a former employee named Hsu. However, employee was arrested before he had the opportunity to hand over the secret details in mainland China. Meantime, a legal action is now being taken by Micron against some of its Taiwan partners for the alleged stealing of their tech.

Meanwhile, TSMC's 28nm is being used to manufacture AMD's 28nm gaming console, including the HD 7000, R 300 and R 200 graphics chips. However, AMD's FinFeet business is currently being supplied by GlobalFoundries with 14nm wafers for the RX 400 and R 500 series Polaris graphics processors, including the latest AMD Ryzen CPUs, Seeking Alpha reported.

AMD Radeon RX Vega is expected to launch in the second quarter of 2017, however, rumors claim that AMD will have limited GPU stocks available for the consumers. Further reports suggest that AMD will only have less than 200,000 units of the new Radeon RX Vega graphics card, and could only produce 16,000 units of RX Vega in the first few months following its launch.

The limited AMD Radeon RX Vega, meanwhile, shows that the retail stores will experience a major shortage early one, which leaves consumers stranded as they search to buy the new graphics card. Meantime, the reason for the limited supply is believed to be due to the low production of HBM2, which is also expensive to produce, WCCFTech reported.