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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: pgerassi who wrote (182181)	1/4/2006 2:50:16 PM
From: FJB	Respond to of 275872

Newsmaker: On beyond Opteron news.com.com Let's talk about AMD's raw silicon level. Opteron and Athlon chip architectures are based on your K8 designs, previously called Hammer. Is there a K9--or Hammer 2--in the works? Hester: There's kind of two separate discussions related to that question. One is the software-visible instruction set architecture, the ISA. The second thing is the internal architecture of how you actually implement that in silicon, and so those two things are separable. Let me give you some examples. If you look at what we're doing around virtualization and security on Pacifica (which will let computers run multiple operating systems) and Presidio (a security technology that ensures separate processes can't interfere with each other), those were instruction set architecture (ISA) extensions. Obviously, hardware changes are needed under the covers to implement that, but there are those who have done so largely around the microarchitecture code that exists today. So, AMD's kind of manufacturing in strategy is roughly every quarter we've got a higher performance transistor and so you kind of keep the same underlined microarchitecture and incrementally improve new manufacturing technology. So, the structure of the microarchitecture largely stays the same. Then there is a brand new core design that has to be fully backwards compatible with the old instruction set architecture. Then you can also choose to introduce new instruction set extensions at the time of that new core. So, what you typically see is a core that lives--depending on the market segment--two to four years, and so then you want to time the introduction of a new core with major changes that you need at the system level. At that point, you could look at things like next-generation memory technology. There'll be cases where you'd want to introduce a new generation core along with the new memory technology. There will be other cases where, for example--and that's the case right now that lot of people told us--they want to keep the same base design that we've got, but go to DDR2 (Double Data Rate RAM) as opposed to Intel's FB-DIMMs (Fully-Buffered Dual Inline Memory Module). So it's really kind of listening to the ecosystem about what they want to see from us in a road map. We have a menu of things that we can do both incrementally and with new cores that are cause for discussions. So right now, our belief is that through the 2007 time frame, using new implementations of the existing core with extensions and memory technology is the right answer. Then, roughly in 2007, we'll see the introduction of a brand new core design kind of under the covers. Does that include a plan to offer quad-core processors by 2007? Hester: Yes.