AMD reveals future plans and Fusion details

Thursday 14th December 2006, 12:12:00 PM, written by Arun

AMD had its analyst day just a few hours ago, with replay webcasts now available on their website. It's also full of rather shocking strategic details, and bullish in terms of financial data. If AMD manages to deliver, they definitely might be about to give a much tougher time to Intel than many previously thought they would. Financially speaking, they expect 50% margins for 2007 (which is rather impressive, given that ATI's margins were in the 30% range at the time of the acquisition) and bigger merger-related cost reductions than previously anticipated, mostly thanks to certain expensive R&D-related items that they realized both companies bought from the same vendors.

First of all, AMD claims they scrapped their many-core plans, and aren't going to enter a "core war" with Intel. Instead, they seem to want to limit their efforts at 4 cores for the desktop and 8 for the server markets. They claim entering many-core paradigms wouldn't benefit the consumer, and from our point of view, this is most likely accurate: software developers most likely won't be ready to take advantage of 8 or 12+ cores for a while to come. And arguably, they could always add more cores later, rather than do it before there's any actual performance boost associated with it.

So, what is AMD's CPU strategy from now on? They want to add "Accelerated Processing Units" (xPUs) to their products, instead of more identical x86 cores. Fundamentally, this is an approach much more similar to CELL's, but also extremely different. SPEs are still relatively general-purpose, although quite optimized for certain workloads; a xPU, on the other hand, might be even more special purpose if the market warrants it. This also means further modularity in their design approach and greater differentiation in their product offerings for various markets. Servers, for example, might need certain kinds of co-processors, while desktops might need other ones, or none at all besides the graphics core.

In the case of Fusion, the GPU will basically be a large xPU on the same die as the x86 cores. Given AMD's interests in GPGPU, which they call "Stream Computing", it also seems likely to us that they'd be increasingly interested in accelerating various workloads with this architecture. Obviously, for per-mm2 and per-watt physics processing performanece, a GPU is going to eat a modern x86 core for lunch; so if AMD decided to reposition these GPU cores for other purposes when there's another GPU on the system, they'd definitely have an interesting strategy going there.

Finally, AMD announced Fusion would initially be aimed at the mobile market in early 2009, while before they still pondered the possibility of getting it out sometime in 2008. It's a bit unclear when they plan to have the desktop equivalent ready, although you'd assume that to be sometime in 2009 too; who knows whether that's H1 or H2, however.

The Tech Report has some further coverage of the subject and a few related slides, if you're keen on reading a bit more about it. We plan on posting some more information related to AMD's analyst day tommorow, so stay tuned!

amd ±

RWT Analyzes Bulldozer Benchmarks
AMD Bulldozer microarchitecture analysis
Say hello to GLOBALFOUNDRIES
AMD completes deal with ATIC to create The Foundry Company
AMD Propus to be released in Q2 & Q3
AMD launch 45nm Phenom II processor
AMD goes Asset Smart; splits into two
Beyond Programmable Shading course notes available
AMD launches FireStream 9250 with 200Gflops DP via RV770
AMD GPGPU solutions get extra support from industry partners