Understanding AMD's Roadmap & New Direction
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 2, 2012 6:16 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Trade Shows
- AMD FAD 2012
The New Focus: Client Mobility
For years we had asked for lower power AMD mobile solutions. While we finally started seeing some progress over the past couple of years, AMD is now very committed to building mobile devices. Anything tablet sized or above is now AMD's target for client APUs.
AMD was always the high-end x86 CPU alternative to Intel in the PC space, now AMD is going to be the alternative in the ultra mobile space.
Servers & the High End Desktop
AMD's server roadmap for the next two years is a bit more conservative. We'll see Piledriver updates from top to bottom but there's no significant departure from the way things are done today. There are no plans for any new sockets in the near term, just using existing platforms to grow AMD's server marketshare without huge new investments.
As AMD's client strategy is predominantly built around APUs, the only high-end desktop parts we'll see from AMD are low-end server CPUs. Socket-AM3+ has a future for one more generation and we'll likely see other single-socket, high-end platforms for the desktop. The days of AMD chasing Intel for the high-end desktop market are done though. That war is officially over.
The Ace: HSA
AMD isn't going to have the fastest general purpose x86 CPUs on the market and it is no longer interested in pursuing that goal. It does promise to have much better on-die GPU performance than Intel. For users today that's primarily an advantage in 3D gaming. As more workloads shift to the GPU however, AMD could have a significant advantage here. The problem is that seamlessly scheduling client workloads across CPUs and GPUs just hasn't happened, the two islands of compute horsepower have remained discrete - even on the new wave of integrated APUs.
AMD's Heterogenous Systems Architecture (HSA) plans to change that. AMD wants to see the creation of a virtual ISA that will be the backbone of a software layer that can schedule application workloads on any combination of underlying CPU/GPU hardware, regardless of the ISA of the hardware. If you have a workload that's best run on big, general purpose x86 cores, that's where it will run. If a task is better designed for highly parallel GPUs cores, it'll run there. And presumably if you had an ARM core somewhere underneath and the workload would run better on it, you'd be covered as well.
AMD plans on delivering an HSA enabled GPU family by 2014, with today's Graphics Core Next GPUs being an intermediary step that already fill a number of these goals. These HSA GPUs would be able to share the same memory space as CPUs and work seamlessly as coprocessors. Granted AMD doesn't have the best track record of quickly moving the industry with things like HSA (although AMD64 did work out quite well), so we'll have to wait and see how all of this plays out.
If AMD can get broad industry support for HSA then its APUs become much more attractive. The overall performance of AMD solutions would then become more compelling as they'd take both CPU and GPU architectures into account, again assuming the workloads require both.
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Sabresiberian - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
The market barely exists??Won't be spending much on R&D??
You people just make this stuff up as you go along. The enthusiast market is flourishing. Dozens of companies do billions of dollars worth of business in the world selling components to enthusiast builders.
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4229845/In...
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/22373
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/multimedia/display/20...
Even where the market share for enthusiast builds (somehow separated from "performance" builds in the xbitlabs article) is predicted to decline, it shows a stable number of computers being built in that category because the market overall increases. The research company also offers the opinion that the high-end market will "always" be a good market.
Is the high-end consumer market the bulk of Intel sales? Of course not, but make no mistake - they DO make good money off of high-end CPUs.
Would you throw away a billion dollars worth of business in one aspect of what you because you do 10 billion in another area? Somehow, I don't think that's what Intel has in mind.
wumpus - Saturday, April 14, 2012 - link
I suspect that intel merely wanted to deny AMD the market. Starving AMD means they won't have the R&D resources needed to attack the high-margin server market.This seems to have been intel's strategy since the first celeron (no enthusiast would buy a K6 over an overclocked celery. No corporate customer would be caught dead buying a celery. Win-win!).
Malih - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
since the low-end server CPUs uses AM3+ socket, we'll have to wait and see how the CPUs perform when used as desktop system, hopefully AnandTech will review them for high-end desktop use.Master_Sigma - Friday, February 10, 2012 - link
"Desktop loyalists" gave AMD the finger a long time ago when they got drunk off of the bullshit Intel benchmarketing Koolaid. Enthusiasts decided that completely synthetic marketing aids that have nothing to do real world performance were all that mattered, and unfortunately AMD doesn't have the chops to tailor their CPUs around those the way Intel can.AMD has finally figured that out and is giving "loyalists" exactly what they want. Have fun with your Intel monopoly. You won.
arjuna1 - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
They are just going to leave the desktop market out in the cold??S*** people, get ready for sky high Intel cpu prices, developing at a crawl pace and working in a locked and limited environment.
bill4 - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
You wish.Impulses - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
Prices might go up some, but Intel doesn't really gain much by squeezing a stagnant desktop market that's barely growing... They'd just give AMD an opening to jump back into it, Intel's smarter than that.AMD has been largely irrelevant on the desktop since the A64 and prices haven't really gone up for the mid and high end parts... They haven't gone down either but we've been getting new architectures from Intel faster than ever (comparing the last 5 years vs the previous 5-10).
Besides, Intel still develops new architectures in a top down fashion, introducing them on the desktop first and then optimizing them for mobile. Until that changes I'm not gonna cru that the sky is falling...
wumpus - Saturday, April 14, 2012 - link
Look at the GPU market. They use fabs a generation behind intel's and cost almost as much as the last generation for the same performance. Moore's law may allow you to get twice the transistors on tomorrow's chip, just don't expect to afford it.You will see sky high intel prices and slow growth with or without AMD. Of course, I can only hope it will only be as bad as the last 5 years (GHz holding ... holding .... holding ...).
Finally, why would anyone expect a public corporation to act anything like a psychopath is beyond me. Simply assume they will slit your throat for a buck regardless of "what you did for them" and you won't be disappointed. Fanboy all you want, but they could care less about you.
Schmich - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
So the reports of AMD leaving Global Foundries were false?"Intel is doing something similar with Haswell."
What a missed opportunity! You can have said "Intel is doing that as well with Haswell" =D
bleh0 - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
It just isn't viable for AMD to attempt to compete with Intel within the consumer high end desktop x86 market. More studies are showing day by day that the average consumer is moving towards a more mobile lifestyle and AMD is doing what is can to move the company in that direction. Why should AMD waste the resources and manpower on high end x86.Also, Intel has to compete against itself in pricing and people just can vote with their wallets if the prices get too high.