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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haplo602 - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
Funny how AMD anticipated some of my changes in hardware preference. I moved to a socket F dual opteron board. in 2 years time, I'll change it for another dual opteron board.The other end goes into my living room as a HTPC next to the TV for the wife (Internet) and kids (low end gaming).
R3MF - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
i am disappointed in their desktop roadmap.ditching sepang/terramar means no on-die PCIe 3.0 controller, and relying on an aging chipset stuck with off-die PCIe 2.0. also means no triple-channel memory in the enthusiast space either.
and not only for 2012, but for much of 2013 as well!
R3MF - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
steve from H thinks its AM2, which i believe the socket that high-end desktop will migrate too from AM3+ next year, so good upgrade path.but is he right?
and am i right?
BPB - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
The simple fact of the matter is the vast majority of folks today don't need anything near high end CPUs. If you are gaming at 1920x1200 or lower, middle of the road cpus and gpus do the trick fine. From what I've read most folks are 1920x1080 or lower, with many at 1680x1050 or lower. My 3 year old AMD box does fine for almost all current games (1920x1200). It's only a couple that recently came out that have me considering a new video card. Even then I'll probably get a 6800 series from AMD, unless a cheaper 7000 series card comes out soon.Yuriman - Sunday, February 5, 2012 - link
Very true, but Intel beats AMD in price/performance AND power/performance and the disparity is only going to grow if AMD keeps adding transistors on old processes. I'm glad AMD is ditching high end CPUs, there's a lot of R&D money there that would be of great benefit elsewhere.It's definitely time for both companies to start building down. I want a netbook that doesn't suck, and since the PC gaming market is so stagnant, any gaming PCs I build will likely be small, quiet, and sip power.
rocketbuddha - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
Anand, did you get clarity from AMD as to what would be the non-SOI 28nm node to be in use?GF or TSMC?
If Brazos 2.0 is going to be in 40nm then that means that AMD mistakenly bet that GF 28nm will be ready in 2012. Else what is the use of introducing Brazos 2 in 40nm node while TSMC 28nm is now manufacturing Krait and soon TI OMAP5.
So AMD either can trust GF will get 28nm in 2013 or use TSMC 28nm (which it has some familiarity manufacturing Discrete Graphics chips). Last year there were some articles in Extremetech by Joel Hruska
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/106217-manufa...
as to AMD going to TSMC for 28nm non SOI APU manufacturing..
If true Jaguar series will be 28nm TSMC HKMG, while for Kaveri (Trinity successor) as well as BD2 and successors AMD has no choice but to use GF SOI processes.
Assuming that Steamroller is BD2, Piledriver is enhanced BD, looks like even in 2013 AMD expects the best SHP SOI process available at Global Foundries would be 28nm. Man! and Intel is supposed to go to 22nm in the middle of this year. Even in 2013 AMD is not sure GF would have a 20nm SOI node ready. Sucks! Let us hope STMicro comes close enough to providing AMD with a choice of foundries.
sapi3n - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
I built a phenom II X6 and AMD 5870 system w/ 16 gigs ram, an SSD, and several 1TB drives, which does crunch pretty well in After Effects, but I wasn't able to get an HDMI capture card to work (Blackmagic prefers intel?) - so do not have that capability, no Mercury Engine Playback support in Premiere (Cuda only), and no 64-bit firewire support on the motherboard (the Asus M4A89TD- Pro's integrated ports do not work with my camera) - very frustrating to have all these problems that wouldn't exist with an intel/nvidia build.jabber - Friday, February 3, 2012 - link
So what you are saying is...you didn't do your homework?Not really the fault of AMD is it?
sapi3n - Saturday, February 4, 2012 - link
no way to test blackmagic without taking the plunge - by the way their support is horrible - fair warning - otherwise, i was under the impression that all cards with current open GL specs would help accelerate Adobe software, which is true - but premiere's mercury playback engine is cuda only - if i'd have known that, I would have purchased differently.sapi3n - Saturday, February 4, 2012 - link
what about buying a game that has physX support, with features turned off for your $500 AMD card - you're fu$$ed.