AMD and GlobalFoundries, CES 2011
by Jarred Walton on January 7, 2011 3:30 AM ESTMore AMD Demos and Future Roadmap
One thing we didn’t see at AMD is Bulldozer, the CPU architecture intended to bridge the gap between the current K10.5 solutions and Intel’s Nehalem and Sandy Bridge offerings. We’ve discussed some of the specifics of Bulldozer in the past, but we still don’t have anything concrete to report in terms of performance. GF reports that 32nm production of Orochi is going well, and Bulldozer will show up later this year, but there was no hands-on time with BD at CES to report on. Estimates however are that it should provide a drop-in replacement on existing AMD servers that should boost performance by around 50%. If the desktop processors can get a similar performance boost, that ought to put Bulldozer into close competition with Sandy Bridge, and there’s no doubt that a 500GFLOPS GPU core (i.e. something similar to the HD 5600 series) will put paid to Intel’s HD Graphics 3000.
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Also present was a single "Llano-like" laptop, but it was only used for a software demonstration from another company. That demonstration consisted of a 3D camera and video camera recording a scene, similar to the Xbox Kinect. The difference here is that the Presentation demo used OpenCL code to process the video signal, analyze the 3D information, and remove the background from the video stream in real time. The result was a sort of blue-screen effect without the use of a blue screen, and the software additionally interacted with a PowerPoint presentation to integrate the presenter with the content—useful for putting the human element into a webcast. The resolution of the 3D signal was such that the outline of the human was a little fuzzy, and the demonstration still tells us very little about Llano performance, but it was still a cool demo.
Brazos is certainly showing uptake at the show, and netbooks should become quite a bit more capable thanks to the design. Going forward, AMD has the Trinity APU that will meld 2-4 Bulldozer cores with a fast GPU core, providing even better performance and flexibility. Where the “Stars” CPUs releasing this year and the Trinity core next year will both use 32nm process technology, it’s interesting that AMD is using 40nm TSMC for production of the Brazos core right now. (This apparently is due to the amount of IP that AMD already has with 40nm GPUs.) Next year, Krishna and Wichita will drop 1-4 Bobcat cores into an APU, and they’ll make the shift to 28nm. We suspect that these chips will shift over to GlobalFoundries 28nm node, though it’s possible AMD could source such chips from both TSMC and GF. Also coming at the top of the CPU performance pile are Zambezi (4-8 Bulldozer cores), roughly in the middle of 2011. That will be followed by Komodo, sporting a full eight Bulldozer cores; neither offering will include an IGP, on the assumption that these high-end CPUs will be paired with discrete GPUs.
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Lolimaster - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link
And with less bias of course.Anandtech Your source for hardware biased analysis and news.
http://scientiasblog.blogspot.com/2006/09/anandtec...
bennyg - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link
I don't care about four + years ago. I look around now and get a lot more info from AT's reviews and analysis than I do from 95% of other reviews which are just regurgitated press release, rehashed marketing lines, a couple of dodgy graphs and a graphic that takes up half a page with a "Gold Award" or "Editors Choice" or some such rubbish.I think you're misinterpreting criticism of crap for "bias".
If you don't like the product, you can always ask for your money back. Oh wait...
mino - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link
1) a quality spin is the most dangerous because you do not recognize it ... (it is the same as with good lies)2) AT has, as a matter of fact, tendency to get spiny here and there, (but i do not believe it is paid for it)
3) This specific article is just a news summary of CES. Accusing it of spin is stupid because its primary purpose is REPORTING about (what companies are) spinning at CES!
bennyg - Saturday, January 8, 2011 - link
yeah, I forgot too, Intel's marketing dollars mustn't be enough to stop AT bagging the crap out of Atom every time it's mentioned.---
I also think Intel - especially it seems with SB - are far ahead of AMD's CPUs as well - jeez, I'm biased - where the hell are my Intel Dollars?!
srp49ers - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link
It seems like you are purposely misleading the readers by saying that bulldozer is coming later this year. When AMD themselves said Q2 at analyst day.Abwx - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link
Such innaccuracies are so big that it s not by chance....silverblue - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link
It's entirely possible that AMD have purposefully gone quiet on the entire subject for fear of promising something that may yet be delayed yet further. Bulldozer not only caters for the enthusiast segment of the market, but pretty much their entire server roadmap... so it would be good for us to be told sooner rather than later if it's going to be delayed or indeed come in early Spring.The server market is their bread and butter, so it's really in their best interests to let their potential customers know the score rather than risk letting them all move over to Nehalem and Sandy Bridge based Xeon servers.
tipoo - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link
Err, Q2 IS later this year, is it not?JarredWalton - Friday, January 7, 2011 - link
I have to admit that the complete and utter lack of Bulldozer stuff at CES is rather shocking to me. Dual-core Sandy Bridge isn't going to be immediately available for purchase, but such laptops were everywhere. More to the point, we're seeing a lot of stuff that won't come out officially until Q3'11, so that's why I'm wondering where Bulldozer/Orochi/Zambezi are. If they're launching at the start of next quarter, why not a single sample system at the AMD meeting room?Now, to give you the other side of the story, AMD is about at the "quiet time" of the year right before they report earnings. I'm not sure of all the specifics, but basically companies aren't supposed to talk about much at all in such situations, and perhaps that's why Bulldozer isn't at CES. As I mentioned above, AMD did inform me that Llano and Bulldozer would come out within ~1 month of each other, and I believe they were suggesting ~May for Llano which would mean ~June for Bulldozer.
Anyway, those of you who haven't ever tried to cover a trade show like this can't imagine the difficulty of keeping everything straight. There were several inaccuracies in the initial text, which I have now corrected. however, I got about two hours of sleep Tuesday night before running around all Wednesday. That was followed by ~5 hours of sleep, then more running around like crazy (from ~8:30AM to 6:30PM that night). At the end of all the meetings, you then get to try and put together an article discussing everything you saw that might have been interesting, and lack of sleep certainly comes into play. I thought it would take about an hour to finish up this article when I started at 7PM. It ended up posting at around 12:30AM. It's not that the article took a lot of time to write, but when your brain is fried after a couple hard days it's difficult to focus and get things done--for me at least.
I've got some other updates regarding AMD to post, but overall I'm quite pleased with what they're releasing right now and I figured most people would accuse me of being too positive. Apparently not.
techworm - Saturday, January 8, 2011 - link
i don't undrstand why you are insisting to put bulldozer later than what is scheduled to be;i mean it has been clarified by AMD that bulldozer will launch prior to Llano which puts it exactly in late april timeframe as was mentioned by some comments