Today is AMD's Financial Analyst Day at AMD's campus in Sunnyvale, CA. I'm not a financial analyst but there are some useful tidbits that are coming out of the presentations today. Obviously the focus at AMD these days is returning to profitability and with the planned spinoff of its manufacturing business, this should be possible.


AMD was quick to point out that it only has one competitor in the CPU space and one competitor in the GPU space. There are very few markets where there are only two competitors, which led to the following statement: "We ought to be able to make money, and we can make money".

Manufacturing is going to be an important topic today and AMD plainly laid out its manufacturing transitions for next year: AMD is going to move chipsets to 45nm in 2009, graphics will be pushed down to 40nm, and we'll see 32nm designs completed for production in 2010.


I'm not sure if I'm reading this correctly but it appears to say that AMD's marketing strategy for North America is graphics-exclusive, with no real Phenom focus. The important disclosures thus far have been in the roadmaps however.

The Server Roadmap

Today AMD launched its Shanghai processor, the 45nm follow-on to last year's Barcelona. We also got a brief update on its server roadmap:


In the 2nd half of 2009 we'll see Istanbul, a 6-core 45nm product that will work in current sockets for Barcelona/Shanghai. In 2010 we'll see 8-core and 12-core solutions with up to four DDR3 memory channels and four Hyper Transport links.

45nm Phenom? It's called the Phenom II and you get it Next Year
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  • melgross - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link

    And what happens if Intel prevails, and AMD is no longer considered to have a license from them because of the Foundry split?

    If the idea of that was to give the Foundry the ability to compete for other customers, it could be a bust, and both halves will flounder.
  • Griswold - Friday, November 14, 2008 - link

    Its not up to Intel to decide and I'm sure AMD still had the money to hire an army of licensing and patent rights seasoned lawyers to test this deal for its water tight sealings beforehand.
  • hechacker1 - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link

    Intel Platform: 9.7FPS?

    I have a 1080p capture of Heros. Using Nero Recode (latest version) I get ~38FPS on my q6600 G0 @ 3.15GHz.

    Thats to a native resolution iphone format.

    I'm sure there are even faster encoders. I though ati's previous encoder was cpu based and still faster than their claim.
  • MadMan007 - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link

    It's marketing slides, what do you expect, truth or details of the testing?
  • hechacker1 - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link

    And I should mention cpu ultilization hovers around %60 percent. Nero's encode doesn't do so good on that particular sample. For 720p material I get ~50-60fps with hq settings. I'm sure it can be tweaked to get more fps.
  • JarredWalton - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link

    I'm pretty sure Nero Recode doesn't do H.264, which is typically about 3X slower than something like DivX, which in turn is 3X slower than straight MPEG2. I could be mistaken, but last time I used a Nero Recode it was only MPEG2.
  • Griswold - Friday, November 14, 2008 - link

    Of course Nero is capable of using H.264. They call it AVC, thats all.
  • hechacker1 - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link

    It's h.264 AVC standard profile I believe for an ipod. Nero has supported this for a while now.

    I'm just saying there are CPU based encoders that do much better than AMD's claims. And probably with higher quality.
  • JarredWalton - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link

    iPod supports HD H.264!? Why? I mean, you only need a piddly 480x270 resolution or something for that display, right? I suppose if you can connect it to an HDTV via component or HDMI... but you can't. LOL
  • Griswold - Friday, November 14, 2008 - link

    Yes they all support h.264. Whats wrong with that? Its not just a HD codec, you know...

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