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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another voice - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
intel also has to compete with itself on performance.Anyone looking at the highish end cpu (i5 or more) already has a cpu.
intel can only charge lots for its new cpu if they are significantly faster than whatever the customer currently owns, cause if its too much for a small performance gain then that generation will get skipped and customer waits for a new generation thus intel sells less.
Impulses - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
Yup, even if AMD shifts focus away from the desktop (which they should've done years ago) Intel won't have free reign to squeeze the market, one slip still gives a more agile AMD room to jump back in... At worst we'll see Intel's tick tock strategy shift to a slower pace, but Intel still derives much of the efficiency of newer mobile parts out of introducing newer smaller processes so...chizow - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
Thank god someone else gets it. I've been hearing this "we need competition and AMD for cheap CPUs" meme repeated for the last 5 years. In the meantime, AMD still doesn't have a CPU that convincingly beats what Intel was offering then and yet, Intel continues to release newer, faster CPUs every year.But yes its just as you said, Intel is still competing with themselves and needs to provide incentive for users to actually "upgrade" to a faster CPU. Its not like CPUs expire or even "die" after a few years.
Its really very similar to other markets, like Apple with iPhone or Samsung with Galaxy. Or Madden or Modern Warfare. Even without significant competition, people will buy the latest and greatest but there needs to be enough reason to buy the next iteration.
chizow - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
It makes you wonder though why AMD has no mobile strategy and no interest in even entertaining it.Beenthere - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
WHERE does anyone see AMD say they will not continue to deliver excellent desktop CPUs? WHERE? Show me WHERE you see this written or stated by an AMD exec? WHERE exactly did people come up with this nonsense idea?Let me guess when AMD said they were not going to compete directly with Intel everyone concluded that AMD was no longer going to produce high performance desktop CPUs. Well if you did then you thought WRONG. In addition to all of their current products they are also going to offer ULV products for tablets and other devices. These are additional revenue streams not a replacement for desktop CPU sales.
PLEASE stop whining. Vishera will be out this Fall and there are more desktop CPUs to follow.
Risforrocket - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
Well if AMD will not continue to design and produce high end CPUs then I will probably stop using the CPUs they do make in my high performace desktop. This is, I think, what people are trying to say, and they are right in saying just that.arjuna1 - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
Both the 2012 and 2013 client roadmaps show only Vishera as a performance desktop part, other than that, 3rd gen bulldozer, "steamroller", comes in 2013 as an APU part, unless the cpu part is a performing champ and the gpu part is a high end 7k series AMD will effectively, as Anand stated, abandoning the high end race.I fully understand that as a company the have nothing to catch up with intel and the focus is placed on other markets, but after all this years of supporting them one can only feel butt hurt to see them leaving us in the air.
As it looks the AM3+ platform is dead already, I don't know about you but I don't have bottomless pockets to have the luxury of investing in a new platform with it's end of the road already in sight.
Beenthere - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
There will be more desktop CPUs after Vishera. The AM3+ platform isn't dead because it will run Vishera. After that we'll see. AMD may have a few tricks up their sleeve as they are making Opterons to run on AM3+ sockets... You do recall Opteron 165's were fine OC'ers, right?Butt hurt? You must be kidding. I don't know how people reach such absurd conclusions about AMD not continuing with high end desktop CPUs. Yes mainstream will migrate to APUs - as I have said for over a year, but AMD will continue to offer top end desktop CPUs also.
arjuna1 - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
Actually, their idea is: their high end desktop parts are now their low end server parts, that's what they did with BD and we all know the end result, don't we??If Vishera is an APU I highly doubt it will run off AM3+, which is fine anyway, I wasn't expecting the AM socket to last forever, but the new trend is obvious, AMD is no longer interseted in the high end desktop market, and I'm not interested in APUs, and won't be couple of years still.
Sabresiberian summed it up pretty well:
they no longer are interested in supplying what I want, so we must part ways.
mak360 - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
dude, your like a broken record "we must part ways", be gone and don`t let the door hit your ass on way out lol.if you're an high end user, you should be with intel anyway, so whats your point?