AMD roadmap piece from this past week's analysts' day...
extremetech.com
<<..."We believe the purpose of our company is to reinvent the dynamics of the microprocessor industry," said Hector Ruiz, AMD's president, chairman and chief executive officer.
Future enhancements to the AMD core architecture will include per-core power management, improvements to the HyperTransport specification, secure execution, and even dedicated coprocessors, Chuck Moore, who oversees AMD's core microprocessor architectures, told analysts.
On the surface, AMD's roadmaps forward bear superficial resemblances to Intel's, in that both companies share a desire to increase the number of cores on the processor die. Both companies also are developing technologies like virtualization, which can share system resources among concurrent instances of an operating system. Intel, however, has leaned heavily toward developing platforms, backed with a "grab bag" of supporting technologies, according to Dirk Meyer, AMD's president of its processor division.
"We think at AMD [the move toward platforms] is a good trend; it signals a move away from speeds and feeds…and a random grab bag of features," Meyer said. "We're focused on the end value for the end-user community."
AMD opened its meeting by touting its ties to Hollywood, a strategy that AMD executives said they will increasingly adopt going forward.
Quad cores due in 2007
AMD ignored flash memory entirely, following the company's decision earlier this year to spin off its Spansion flash business venture. "We are sharpening our focus intensely," Ruiz said. "We are now a microprocessor company."
Server roadmaps shown by company executives confirmed that the company's Opteron processor will move to a quad-core architecture beginning in 2007, together with the ability to scale to 32 processors and above. Similar roadmaps presented for the company's desktop processor roadmap lacked the quad-core disclosure, however, which could indicate that quad-core, AMD-based PCs will arrive in 2008 or later.
"The server market is the market where acceleration [of AMD's technology] is the most impressive," Meyer said.
During the first quarter of 2005, AMD captured 27.8 percent of the total market for 4-way servers, he said. An AMD dual-core Opteron can perform about "13 SSL sessions per watt per second," a metric that highlighted AMD's emphasis on low-cost, high throughput architectures. An Intel two-way Xeon can process about 6, he said.
In 2006, AMD will ship its "Pacifica" virtualization and "Presidio" security technology, together with third-party chipset support for hardware-based RAID 5, Serial ATA-2, Serial SCSI, and hardware TCP/IP offloading for improved networking performance.
AMD's server and workstation plans call for the company to develop HyperTransport 3.0, according to Chuck Moore, AMD's chief microprocessor architect. The current HyperTransport 2.0 specification, to be added to AMD's chips this year, allows for bandwidth of up to 22.4 gigabits per second. In 2007, RAS and "memory mirroring" will also be added to the Opteron, according to Marty Seyer, AMD's corporate vice president and general manager of its Microprocessor Business Unit, together with a level-3 cache.
AMD Desktops Shift to DDR-2
AMD's commercial and consumer desktop platforms, meanwhile, will anticipate the arrival of Microsoft's "Longhorn" operating systems with versions of Pacifica and Presidio due to arrive in 2006. In addition, AMD and its partners plan support for the "Aero Glass" graphical interface that will be part of Longhorn.
AMD's vision of the desktop PC is heavily segmented. AMD's desktop roadmap, for example, envisions an "extreme performance" PC, an "digital life content creation" PC, a "digital life entertainment" PC, a "work at home/homework" PC, and a "value computing" PC. Save for the cheapest value PC, all of the PCs can use either an Athlon 64 or Athlon 64 X2, AMD said.
AMD also plans a push into the "blade PC" market and thin-client markets later this year, following the lead set by Hewlett-Packard and others. "We're going to be driving that – as a matter of fact we have no reason not to drive that," Seyer said. "Enterprises are asking for stability and lower cost and we're going to provide that…it's a natural extension of server-based computing."
AMD's lower-end PCs will emphasize power management and manageability, In 2005, AMD's blade PC offerings will each consume about 30 watts of power. By 2007, that will be restricted to under 10 watts, Seyer said.
During 2006, AMD's integrated memory controllers will shift over to DDR-2, the next-generation memory technology currently being ramped in the marketplace. Although Intel supports the technology with its latest chipsets, AMD has taken a conservative approach to the memory transition.
In 2007, however, AMD's desktop PC platforms will shift again, to DDR-3 memory as well as the second generation of PCI Express, which has yet to be ratified as an independent industry standard. Intel developed the first generation of the standard, but has since pulled back to allow others to push it forward, with only one vote in the PCI Special Interest Group, according to Jim Pappas, director of initiative marketing for Intel, in an interview on Tuesday.
AMD also plans to enhance its value Sempron processor with 64-bit capabilities.
AMD's mobile processors will gain their own dual-core products in 2006, with products designed for 35-watt and 62-watt environments. However, a 25-watt product has disappeared from the roadmap, possibly indicating that AMD will not be able to compete in the thin-and-light notebook market. In 2007, AMD's mobile platforms will add WiMAX support.
"AMD plans to continue offering 25-watt parts as long as there is market demand (or customer need) for them," said Cathy Abbinanti, a spokeswoman for AMD, in an email.
Future technologies
More and more, power and thermal limitations are becoming the gating factor on new designs, AMD's Chuck Moore told analysts in his own presentation. Moore, who now oversees all of AMD's microprocessor designs, said that the flexibility of the architecture also determined how fast the product could be shipped to market.
AMD's "next-generation designs" are already being worked on, while future cores are being hashed out in AMD's Sunnyvale, Calif. headquarters under Moore's supervision, Moore said.
Under development, the upcoming HyperTransport 3.0 will feature three times the throughput of today's connections, Moore said, part of AMD's strategy to improve the connections both inside the chip and off of it. AMD's desktop roadmaps show a "xGHz" version of HyperTransport shipping in 2007, which AMD executives did not explain.
Naturally, AMD plans enhancements to the cores themselves. AMD is developing new multimedia-specific instructions for the Athlon 64 architecture, Moore said, as well as additional enhancements to the floating-point architecture. AMD's PowerNow! power-management technology will also be improved with the ability to power-manage each core and even portions of cores, he said. Meanwhile, AMD is also exploring developing and possibly embedding dedicated coprocessors to help with specific tasks, even computation, he said.
AMD is also eyeing "cluster based multithreading," a technology specifically designed for large enterprise clusters. The technology would allow other microprocessors to share specific blocks on the chip, such as the floating-point unit. Designing this technology in will cost an additional 50 percent in die resources, but yield an additional 80 percent improvement in performance, Moore said.
Chartered to Meet Additional Demand
Although AMD currently manufactures its microprocessors at a single fab, a second, Fab 36, is nearly complete next door to AMD's Fab 30 in Dresden, Germany. Scheduled to come on line early next year, the fab will initially produce 90-nm wafers but quickly shift over to 65-nm lines, said Daryl Ostrander, senior vice president of logic and manufacturing.
Through a partnership with Chartered Semiconductor – and IBM, who helped refine the manufacturing process – AMD will be able to pass excess demand onto Chartered, which Ostrander characterized as a "flex fab".
Scheduled to come on line in 2006, Chartered's lines will be able to supply roughly 10 million processors in 2006 and about 30 million in 2007, according to a chart Ostrander displayed. Chartered will supply 65-nm chips in 2007.
Ostrander said that refinements to AMD's Automated Precision Manufacturing strategy would allow the company to react extremely quickly to possible glitches, and that some elements of the technology would be installed at the Chartered facility. A formal process of "continued technology improvement" will help AMD install new technologies using manufacturing processes. Meanwhile, 45-nm development is on track, he said...>> |
