While we've had plenty of time to digest Intel's
path forward, we've been
critiquing AMD's latest
efforts rather than gazing down their intriguing roadmap. Nevertheless, a (presumably yawn-inducing) four-hour presentation yielded a few noteworthy tidbits about where
AMD's headed, and how it plans to arrive. The firm insinuated that Intel's
gazillion-core approach was simply rehashing the megahertz race, and said it would be focusing it efforts instead on Accelerated Processing Units (APUs). Although the composition is still a bit vague, the devices will supposedly be "multi-core chips that include any mix of processor cores and other dedicated processors," such as discrete units for graphics, physics, audio, video, encoding, etc. While a dash of this has already been divulged when we heard about
Fusion, it looks likes AMD's getting pretty serious about it now. Additionally, the desktop roadmap didn't deviate from what we'd
previously seen, but the firm plans to unveil a new power-conscience "Hawk" processor to replace the current
Turion 64 X2 and Mobile Sempron chips. Moreover, it's working on offering up a hybrid graphics solution, which would see discrete GPUs disabled when unplugged from a power source, letting the integrated graphics set take over and conserve juice. Finally, the company plans to introduce yet another mobile chip (dubbed Griffin) in late 2007 that will reportedly support split power planes and HyperTransport 3.0, hopefully meaning that it'll be based on a
quad-core architecture. While we don't exactly recommend sitting through the entire webcast, those who eat, sleep, and drink circuitry can hit the read link for the full (and we do mean full) skinny.
[Via
TechReport, thanks Keaton]
posted Dec 15th 2006 10:56PM
Its only a matter of time when we see GPUs and CPUs converge and AMD has a great opportunity here. How about acquiring Ageia and integrating the physics processor as well? That'll be sweet.
Well AMD's CFO stated this week that his company WILL take another 10% of market share from Intel in 2007. So they need to come up with something devilishly clever almost immediately. I don't see it. I see a new CFO at AMD shortly.
Hmmm... CFO... Not sure what a CFO has to do with the equation... CFO has to justify the financial trends, P/E ratios of a company... The CTO and associated would be more key to any initiative to do with technological advancement...
IMHO I think AMD has it right on the ball if they can deliver... If ASIC type processors can do mission specific tasks highly efficiently with less power, and vastly lower specs that a general purpose CPU then if they can develop, or encourage 3rd parties to make compatible purpose specific processors to fit into an open architecture hierarchy then I would think everyone wins...
It makes me almost nostalgic to think how far ahead the even modestly powered Amiga 500 was... a true multitasking OS on a floppy, with discrete I/O, Graphics, Sound, etc... It did burnout circles in certain tasks even up to comparatively recently... Just look at the old demo scene for proof...
I hope they open the spec, it is widely adopted, and we will all reap the benefit... The option of tweaking your computer performance to be application driven is going to be BIG...
It will be very interesting to see how AMD does this. I see Intel's way of many more general cores to one CPU to be easier on programmers, and so might it take programmers a little extra time to get used to AMD's setup? Anyways, it will be quite a CPU fight if Intel and AMD take drastically different roads on CPU design.
By the way, is the "xPU" just a stand in for any type of processor they might make for it? Or an actual type of processor?
It says xPU so it could be more than just integrated graphics, you could have a physics processing core, network core, sound core etc. Instead of all these external cards and chips everything will be done on one chip some day. Won't have to worry much about bus speed.