Manufacturing Roadmap
AMD finished things off with a brief update on its manufacturing. By the middle of this year AMD's Fab 36 will be completely transitioned over to 65nm, which is just in time for Barcelona to ramp up production.
By the middle of 2008, AMD plans on bringing 45nm to market, approximately 6 months after Intel does. Fab 36 will continue to be AMD's most advanced fab, with 45nm coming out of it starting in 2008 and by 2010 AMD expects to move the fab to 32nm.
AMD showed off the same 45nm SRAM test vehicle we saw over a year ago in Dresden, which is a bit bothersome. We expected to see more than what we had already seen, but it could be that AMD continues to be a bit more guarded than we'd like; either that or functional 45nm CPU silicon just isn't yielding yet.
Final Words
Needless to say, there's more to come and this is just the beginning. The fact that we can say this about AMD is an absolute shock to us, and possibly to you as well. For the longest time it seemed like the only CPU articles we'd write were either disappointing AMD product launches or exciting new Intel announcements. AMD is changing, arguably later than we'd like, but at least it's happening.
For a while we had lost confidence in AMD, like many of you had as well, and although AMD's position in the market hasn't changed we are more confident now that it can actually bounce back from this. Intel seemed to have the perfect roadmap with Conroe, Penryn and Nehalem all lined up back to back, and we saw little room for AMD to compete. Now, coming away from these meetings, we do believe that AMD may have a fighting chance. Over the coming months you'll begin to see why; it won't be an easy battle, but it will be one that will be fought with more than just price.
AMD's Fusion strategy looks to be an even stronger part of its future plans, if Phil Hester's prediction of a heterogeneous processing era comes true. While Intel has managed to deliver a much stronger CPU roadmap, we don't have much of an understanding of its answer to Fusion in the long term. AMD has very much been a leader in areas such as the move to 64-bit, an on-die memory controller, and now we may see the same leadership role with the move to integrate the CPU and GPU. The integrated CPU/GPU, taken to the exploitation stage as it was called by AMD, has the potential to really change the CPU as we know it. We do know that Intel has a response, but we're not as clear as to exactly what it is.
That being said, there's a lot that AMD has to do in the near term to ever get us to the point where the ATI acquisition could pay off. Barcelona is still at least a quarter away, we have no idea how it will actually perform, and AMD isn't giving us any indication. Despite a relatively weak introduction of Intel's latest Centrino platform, AMD still doesn't have a good competitor; while Fusion will give it a unique selling point into the mobile market, the first Fusion core is still well over a year away. The same worries we've had about AMD are still there; while we now know that AMD has some truly wonderful things planned for its future, we worry how great of a toll the interim will take on the company.
It is often said that what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger; despite losing $611 million dollars last quarter, and not winning a single performance benchmark since Intel launched its Core 2 processors, AMD is not dead. Market share is diminished, morale is low, but it may just be possible for AMD to come back from this stronger than ever. We're not exactly sure how AMD has lasted through all of this, but if it can pull through, we may once again have two very competitive manufacturers in the CPU industry.
AMD finished things off with a brief update on its manufacturing. By the middle of this year AMD's Fab 36 will be completely transitioned over to 65nm, which is just in time for Barcelona to ramp up production.
By the middle of 2008, AMD plans on bringing 45nm to market, approximately 6 months after Intel does. Fab 36 will continue to be AMD's most advanced fab, with 45nm coming out of it starting in 2008 and by 2010 AMD expects to move the fab to 32nm.
AMD showed off the same 45nm SRAM test vehicle we saw over a year ago in Dresden, which is a bit bothersome. We expected to see more than what we had already seen, but it could be that AMD continues to be a bit more guarded than we'd like; either that or functional 45nm CPU silicon just isn't yielding yet.
Final Words
Needless to say, there's more to come and this is just the beginning. The fact that we can say this about AMD is an absolute shock to us, and possibly to you as well. For the longest time it seemed like the only CPU articles we'd write were either disappointing AMD product launches or exciting new Intel announcements. AMD is changing, arguably later than we'd like, but at least it's happening.
For a while we had lost confidence in AMD, like many of you had as well, and although AMD's position in the market hasn't changed we are more confident now that it can actually bounce back from this. Intel seemed to have the perfect roadmap with Conroe, Penryn and Nehalem all lined up back to back, and we saw little room for AMD to compete. Now, coming away from these meetings, we do believe that AMD may have a fighting chance. Over the coming months you'll begin to see why; it won't be an easy battle, but it will be one that will be fought with more than just price.
AMD's Fusion strategy looks to be an even stronger part of its future plans, if Phil Hester's prediction of a heterogeneous processing era comes true. While Intel has managed to deliver a much stronger CPU roadmap, we don't have much of an understanding of its answer to Fusion in the long term. AMD has very much been a leader in areas such as the move to 64-bit, an on-die memory controller, and now we may see the same leadership role with the move to integrate the CPU and GPU. The integrated CPU/GPU, taken to the exploitation stage as it was called by AMD, has the potential to really change the CPU as we know it. We do know that Intel has a response, but we're not as clear as to exactly what it is.
That being said, there's a lot that AMD has to do in the near term to ever get us to the point where the ATI acquisition could pay off. Barcelona is still at least a quarter away, we have no idea how it will actually perform, and AMD isn't giving us any indication. Despite a relatively weak introduction of Intel's latest Centrino platform, AMD still doesn't have a good competitor; while Fusion will give it a unique selling point into the mobile market, the first Fusion core is still well over a year away. The same worries we've had about AMD are still there; while we now know that AMD has some truly wonderful things planned for its future, we worry how great of a toll the interim will take on the company.
It is often said that what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger; despite losing $611 million dollars last quarter, and not winning a single performance benchmark since Intel launched its Core 2 processors, AMD is not dead. Market share is diminished, morale is low, but it may just be possible for AMD to come back from this stronger than ever. We're not exactly sure how AMD has lasted through all of this, but if it can pull through, we may once again have two very competitive manufacturers in the CPU industry.
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tygrus - Saturday, May 12, 2007 - link
See latest low-power Athlon64 <10w idle. Can further reduce max power consumption (from 30-60w) if you limit the clock speed to about 1GHz and drop the voltage (<15w).TA152H - Sunday, May 13, 2007 - link
Tygrus,Idle isn't so important to me, getting to less than 1 watt idle isn't particularly hard if you go into sleep mode. You can't build a fanless, noiseless system based on idle performance. I was looking at Intel's ULV stuff too, but it's just not there either. It's kind of disappointing, because most people would be perfectly happy with a 1 GHz K6-III using 8 watts or less as it would on modern processes, and nothing like it is available. VIA's stuff sucks and I don't think is very efficient, even though they are targetting this market. My main machine I just upgraded to a Coppermine 600 on a weird Intel VC820 board. It's perfectly capable of doing just about everything I do, except for compiles (even a Core 2 is too slow for that, Microsoft seriously needs to work on parallelizing their compilers, or if they have recently, I need to buy it :P).
It's an enormous waste of electricity to sell these processors when the vast majority of people don't need them. To Microsoft's credit, they are always up to the challenge of releasing bloated software that requires more memory and processing power but is functionally the same, but at some point even their talent for this might run out.
While I was writing the first reply, I was lamenting about how lousy the current processors are in this respect, but then I read that at least AMD had a clue and said the Athlon design could not address this space and they had to go with something different. Maybe they'll bring the K6-III back, fix it's decoding/memory problems, and have a real winner. In terms of power/performance, there is just no beating it, these superpipelined processors are inherently poor at power use, and clearly have a performance bias. Why VIA went this way is a big mystery to me.
chucky2 - Friday, May 11, 2007 - link
If this article has accomplished one thing, it would be that we finally have confirmation that AM2+ CPU's will work in AM2 motherboards. Up to this point it's been people reporting on "sources" and stuff like that, nothing direct from AMD.Anand's report is more than good enough for me, I can finally rest easy that the PC I just built my cousin will have an upgrade path for at least another year down the road (if not two).
Thanks Anand and AMD! (and screw you Intel for you rediculously short upgrade paths!)
Chuck
AdamK47 - Friday, May 11, 2007 - link
Well played, Anand. Well played.Kiijibari - Friday, May 11, 2007 - link
I would have looked at my watch, while cinebench was running on the 4x4 system to get a rough estimate :)Not a correct result, but better than nothing.
Or was the system so fast, that cinebench was done after a few ns ^^ ? :)
Apart from that, nice article, thanks :)
cheers
Kiijibari
Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, May 11, 2007 - link
I counted seconds in my head, out of fairness to AMD I didn't report the number I calculated :)Take care,
Anand
Sunrise089 - Friday, May 11, 2007 - link
Didn't you guys notice the huge disconnect between the excitement evident in Anand's text and the fairly small ammount of new info? I think it should be obvious that AMD revlealed a lot more, but they have put various NDA dates on when the info can be released. So I would say they did open up a lot, but that we will only see the new info become available as we get closer to Barcelona.Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, May 11, 2007 - link
I think you have to shift your expectations a bit; going into this thing I wanted to see Barcelona performance, I wanted the equivalent of what Intel did with Penryn and Nehalem. I didn't get that, but what I did get was a much clearer understanding of AMD's direction for the future. The section on Fusion is of particular importance to the future of the company, it just so happens that AMD's strategy is in line with Intel's, lending credibility to what it is doing.Then there were a handful of Barcelona tidbits that I needed to stick in some sort of an article, so this one just seemed the best venue to do so. More information is coming though, stay tuned for next week. No benchmarks yet unfortunately :(
Take care,
Anand
Stablecannon - Friday, May 11, 2007 - link
Wonderful. So basically this article was an AMD morale booster.
"Hey this Phil Hester, just wanted to say don't lose faith in us, even though we don;t have anything to show you really...that's because it's a secret. Yeah, that's it. We actually have a 16 core chip running at 3.8 that'll cream Intel. What's that? You want to see it? LOL."
TA152H - Friday, May 11, 2007 - link
First of all, I read the part about AMD becoming much more forthcoming with information, and then saw essentially nothing new in the article. Pretty much all of this stuff is known, and the important stuff you still don't know. So, how are they so much more open again? I didn't see it.Actually, I would have been disappointed if they were. I mean, you can scream about how they're not giving you what YOU want, but it's all about what they want. I don't buy them giving information out too early for Intel, you can be pretty sure there are plenty of companies designing products around AMD's new chip and you can be pretty sure at least one person has "slipped" and told Intel something. It's more likely it's not to AMD's benefit to have people knowing it's so much better than what's out now. How do they move product they are making today when people are waiting for their next great product? It's just common sense, they don't care if people whine about lack of visibility, too much is worse than too little. They have given out some numbers, and they are very high, so I doubt they're too concerned about performance. I think they're more concerned about selling stuff they have out today, which they aren't doing a great job of. What would happen if they showed a great product right around the corner? Q1 would look like a success compared to what they'd endure.
When you talk about Phil Hester you have to realize this guy referred the 8088 an eight-bit architecture (so he was not referring to the data bus). After that, I don't know what to think about what he says.
Next, the reason the 287 didn't sell was because it seriously sucked! It was worse than the 8087 because it didn't even run synchronously with the processor. Considering the 286 was way more powerful than the 8086/8088, there was a perfectly good reason why no one wanted a math coprocessor that was expensive, generally ran at 2/3 CPU speed (unless a seperate crystal was put in for it, which was done with later 286 machines), and actually had less performance than the 8087. The 387 was much more powerful and totally redesigned.
Also keep in mind the 486 was later made in an incarnation called the 486SX, that had either a disabled or no math coprocessor on it.
Saying the Cell is before it's time is implying it's fundamentally a useful product, but other things around it have to catch up. That's wrong and misleading. It's a niche product and it's a bear to program and is terrible in most things besides what it was designed for. Time won't change it, unless they change the Cell. The way it is now, it'll never be anything more than a niche product, nor was it designed to be more than that.
For their < 1 watt processors, it might be interesting to see if they bother with a decoupled architecture. My guess is they'll just run x86 instructions natively, without wasting so much silicon on the decoders.
With regards to AMD's next processor taking so long, I think it's even worse when one considers the K8 isn't really a K8 at all, it's more like a K7+. It's very similar to the K7, and is far less of a jump than the Prescott was from the Northwood. It's more like the Pentium MMX was to the Pentium (I'm not talking about the MMX instructions, there was a lot more changes than that).
The remarks about AMD coming back from this stronger than ever are absurd and ridiculous. They can come back, and they certainly have a good product in the wings, but it's got nothing to do with losing $611 million. It weakened the company, plain and simple, although not irrevocably. They had to slow down their investment and conversion, which isn't good. They had to sell $2 Billion in debts at very disadvantageous terms. Both of these are injuries that will have longer term ramifications for the company. So, yes, they aren't dead, but saying this will make them stronger in the long run is plain wrong and equally weird.