AMD Reveals Plans to Move Beyond the Core Race

J. Dzhugashvili writes "The Tech Report has caught wind of AMD's plans for processors over the coming years. Intel may be counting on cramming 'tens to hundreds' of cores in future CPUs, but AMD thinks the core race is just a repeat of the megahertz race that took place a few years ago. Instead, AMD is counting on Accelerated Processing Units, chips that mix and match general-purpose CPU cores with dedicated application processors for graphics and other tasks. In the meantime, AMD is cooking up some new desktop and mobile processors that it hopes will give Intel a run for its money."

Comments

Re:Same old.

[TrisexualPuppy]

Intel pushes the 'more power! faster!' philosophy while AMD just redesigns the architecture and it takes Intel a few years to catch up. Not much has changed since 2000.

Correct. Intel still has the lion's share of the market, and they want to keep it that way. It's interesting how they "cheat" and lock two dies together and call it dual-core or quad-core just to come out with the technology "first" to keep the investors happy.

AMD is smaller obviously, so it has fewer resources...but with those Alpha scientists, they're going to keep going strongly. It's just a matter of time with business directives like this before AMD takes over. They've been having some really cool ideas...and a few more over a few years, the innovators may win. And no, I'm not an AMD fanboi, but I have talked to some architects from IBM and Intel, and they do concur.

Hybrid Graphics & the Cell roadmap.

[lightversusdark]

The article is a bit light on detail, there's a webcast of the presentation on AMD's Investor Relations site (needs a login (BugMeNot doesn't work) and it's WMP or Real only. And it's apparently four hours long.
The most interesting thing for me was the mention of "Hybrid Graphics":

According to AMD, notebooks with hybrid graphics will include both discrete and integrated graphics processors. When such notebooks are unplugged, their integrated graphics will kick in and disable the discrete GPU. As soon as the notebook is plugged back into a power source, the discrete GPU will be switched on again, apparently without the need to reboot. AMD says this technology will enable notebooks to provide the "best of both worlds" in terms of performance and battery life.

It also looks like they're also extending the Fusion concept along Cell-like lines, with additional cores for non CPU or GPU purposes.
Their road map through 2008 only talks about up to quad core, although I assume this means CPU cores (I'm not sure that I would accept a CPU+GPU on a single die branded as a 'dual-core' chip). I think the Cell has eight cores, but due to yield issues not all are enabled in a PS3, and they are not all functionally equivalent. I don't know if this is the case for the Cell-based IBM blades, though.
The roadmap basically looks like periodic refreshing of the product line reducing power consumption with each iteration, which is where I think Intel have got a head-start on AMD. However, if AMD can sort out the yield issues, and compilers and developers begin to take advantage of these "associate" cores in Cell and future AMD architectures, then maybe Intel will have turned out to have missed a trick, as they did with x86-64.

Re:hyper transport

[ZachPruckowski]

FSB 1333 (333 QDR) seems to be holding up well for 4 cores at the moment. It only really seems to be much of an issue in the 4+ socket world (which is admittedly lucrative). You are correct in the sense that Intel stands to gain from a move to a hypertransport-like system, but that only raises the counter-issue: If Intel has the performance lead now, even with the FSB issues, then AMD's 07-08 products have to hit it out of the park to beat Intel's chips without that handicap.

The real issue is feature size. AMD is hurt badly by being consistently behind on that. Intel's been at 65 nm for a while now, and AMD is only now releasing 65 nm parts. Intel will be at 45 nm in some lines by this time next year, while AMD is a year behind them. Feature size brings with it higher yields (more chips per wafer) once you work the kinks out, lower heat, and more transistors per chip. That's the game winner right there, unless one of them shoots themselves in the foot again, like Netburst.