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
ARM & The Future
Thankfully, Rory isn't HPing the company. AMD will continue to build its own x86 CPUs and GCN (and future) GPUs. The difference is that AMD will now consider, where it makes sense, using other architectures. AMD didn't come out and say it, but it's clear that the other ISA under consideration is designed by ARM. In the markets where it makes sense, AMD might deliver an ARM based solution. In others it may deliver an x86 based solution. The choice is up to the market and customer, and AMD is willing to provide either.
What's most interesting is that AMD was very clear about not wanting to be in the smartphone market. It believes, at least today, that the smartphone SoC market is too low margin to make financial sense. With smartphone SoCs selling for under $20 and given how hard it has been for Intel and NVIDIA to break into that market, I don't blame AMD for wanting to sit this one out. However, smartphones have been a huge success for ARM. If AMD is to offer ARM based SoCs coupled with their own CPU/GPU IP in other markets, it's unclear what the reception will be. The flexibility is definitely appreciated and it's a far more defensible position than saying that all future products have to use x86, but simply embracing ARM isn't a guarantee for success.
Rory Read presented a vision of the future where a large, vertically integrated device manufacturer may want to deliver custom silicon for everything from tablets to notebooks to TVs. AMD's goal is to be able to provide silicon to companies like this, while differentiating based on its own internal IP (x86 CPUs, GPU cores). One current example would be Microsoft's Xbox 360. AMD designed much of the silicon for that console, although it's using 3rd party CPU IP. In other words, should a customer want an ARM based solution mated with an AMD GPU, they could have one. If a customer wanted a strange x86/ARM APU, that would be a possibility as well.
AMD did a good job outlining that it would be more agile and flexible, however it didn't outline what specific products we'd see that implement this new architecture agnostic mentality. I suspect AMD's lack of specific examples is a result of the simple fact that the new management team has only been in place for a handful of months. It will take a while to develop outlines for the first products and a clear roadmap going forward. Until then, it's all about executing on the APU, GPU and server CPU fronts.
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A5 - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
The fact that their "enthusiast" desktop CPU will be 32nm through the end of 2013 essentially signals that they are giving up on that market.The Opteron 165 came out 6 years ago - the fact that that is the chip you have to point to is pretty telling, no?
Beenthere - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
Sorry but your beliefs are incorrect at this time.I don't have the Opteron 165. It was a reference to prior Opteron success for desktop use.
The point was that AMD is making faster Opterons that use AM3+ sockets. Why would they do this when they already have C32 and G34 sockets?
Look at the roadmap slide carefully with Piledriver, Steamroller and Excavator all bringing ~15% increase each year and fitting into AM3+ sockets. This ain't rocket science.
28 nm will not offer any big gains over 32nm so that's not even an issue. There is diminishing returns with each step to smaller traces. AMD has said they ain't going to push the trace size but instead they will optimise the cores for better performance.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5488/amds-2012-2013-...
Impulses - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
I'll never understand blind brand loyalty, specially for CPUs where there isn't much else to take into account besides performance per dollar... At least when it comes to other products the brand loyalists have additional arguments to stand on like build quality, support, reliability, etc.I've had one AMD system, an A64 3000+ Winchester, from the only brief period in history where they were on their game and able to out-execute and out-preform Intel. Every other desktop's been Intel based, they were almost always the smarter purchase. Altho if I was gonna replace my current netbook with another sub-$500 system I'd definitely opt for Brazos right now.
Shifting focus is a smart move for AMD, who cares if a few enthusiasts get butt hurt and a couple others keep hopelessly calling for high end parts? The mobile market's growing faster, it's already larger than the high end desktop market, and enthusiasts & halo products don't drive sales like they used to.
Plus, quite frankly, an Intel dominated mobile market is a heck of a lot scarier than an Intel dominated enthusiast market. Just look at what Intel's been pushing lately, ultrabooks are sexy but they're also a tool to drive the price of the average laptop up... Why do you think Atom hasn't seen a significant redesign by now? Except for Brazos, Intel has effectively been driving laptops upmarket while keeping Atom stagnant to prevent anyone else from eating into their profits.
If Intel dominates the enthusiast market a few of us might suffer a little, but not much because there's little incentive for Intel to suck a shrinking market dry. If Intel dominates mobile, EVERYONE loses.
IlllI - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
all one has to do is take a look at ARM. they made a massive amount of money last year.mak360 - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
+1I don`t think i could have said it any better
DanNeely - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
Because the dual/quad socket C32/G34 parts are inherently more expensive. For 1 socket boxes it's an unneeded additional expense.B-Unit1701 - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
Are those the same kind of roadmaps that showed Phenom stomping A64? Or Bulldozer way outclassing Phenom? This ain't rocket scinence.I bleed AMD green, but they havent delivered on speed improvement shown on roadmaps in 6+ years, I have a real hard time buying it today.
And your kidding yourself if you think $300 Black Edition CPUs are part of the 'high end' of the market.
silverblue - Saturday, February 4, 2012 - link
Adding 15% extra performance to multithreading would make for an excellent chip indeed, however it's not exactly multithreading where AMD really needs to work its magic, but singlethreading, and let me tell you, adding 15% year on year will POSSIBLY bring them to SB-level singlethreaded IPC by, hmm, 2014? don't need to remind you that Intel aren't going to sit still over this period.Bulldozer may be forward thinking, but there's no arguing that it's a server CPU designed specifically for heavy, multiple workloads, workloads that a lot of people aren't going to see on the desktop. Still, I'd like to see a thorough benchmark of multiple programs at the same time and how Bulldozer handles them. Unfortunately, it won't change the fact that the current architecture has very slow cache, requires very fast RAM to perform decently, isn't exactly the most frugal architecture out there, and bottlenecks graphics cards roughly at the same point that Phenom II did.
Impulses - Thursday, February 2, 2012 - link
" Thankfully, Rory isn't HPing the company. "Is that a new business catchphrase or just Anand's wit?
BitJunkie - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
It's so funny that tech companies are so far behind other organisations that have "engineering" at their core when it comes to execution. Just because tech is tech doesn't mean these companies can forget everyone else's lessons learned:1) Microsoft with Vista: it was only after their code turned into a complete pile of poorly engineered crap all hacked together by a bunch of mavericks wanting to get an "i made this moment". That they went back to the drawing board and actually started engineering their software and processes. This is not just about the process of coding but the process of designing and engineering and how it is managed. Its about culture.
2) Back in the tech bubble / Vista days, everyone was claiming that you could be a project manager and you didn't need domain experience. Sure, thats true: but not if you want rock solid, fail free and optimised execution. You need to apply project management theory and controls to the process and have someone who can see 10 steps ahead and implement quality decision making taking this stuff into account. Not someone with an over inflated ego with one project cycle under their belt claiming to be gods gift to project management.
Seems to me as though someone has sat down in AMD and realised that nobody is going to invest in their platform if they cant reliably expect the next iteration of their product to arrive on time and with good preformance.
They are adopting a strategy that allows them to execute in a reliable way, but are they going to sort out the process, the systems and the company culture?