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

To: Joe NYC who wrote (215179)	10/27/2006 11:01:53 AM
From: eracer	Respond to of 275872

Re: I don't know what the breakdown is between integrated (in the northbridge) and discrete graphics today. Let's say it is 70% integrated and 30% discrete. Having better solution to 70% of the market (including very important mobile market) must be worth something. One thing worth mentioning is that currently, with ODMC, AMD has advantage in some markets (High End server, desktop) but has no advantage - or may have a slight disadvantage in low end market with integrated chipsets. The reason is that Intel integrated solution has memory controller and graphics processor on the same die, with memory accesses not having to go over northbridge - CPU connection. Intel integrated graphics performance really is poor. AMD likely has an advantage here already despite the memory controller performance penalty. Moving to Socket-S1 didn't hurt either. Dual-channel DDR2-533 and DDR2-667 are a significant improvement over single-channel DDR333 in terms of bandwidth available to the CPU and integrated GPU. XBox has shown the solution to high end graphics at 2005 level in 2005. See the system diagram here: en.wikipedia.org It involved total bandwidth to memory of 22.4 GB/s with additional massive bandwidth provided by embedded memory. Looking at K8L die, 2 MB of SRAM L3 seems roughly 30 mm^2. 10MB at 45nm would be roughly 75 mm^2 using SRAM. That would be a bit on the high side even for a high end system, but a cakewalk with Z-RAM. If Z-RAM is 4 to 5 x as dense as SRAM, we are talking 15 to 20mm^2 per 10MB, which could make 20 to 40 MB feasible for high end solution. What is high-end in 2005 will be considered mainstream in late 2008. I would be very impressed if AMD released a GPU-CPU in late 2008-2009 with even half the performance of the XBox 360 GPU. BTW, don't forget the gaming market. I am pretty sure that combined ATI-AMD are going to be actively working to retain and expand the share of this market. It seems to me that the that after tackling the mainstream market in 2008-2009 with integrated CPU-GPU, the goal will be to tackle the high end market with a solution that at the same time could be the basis of the next-gen game consoles. AMD definitely has potential to gain business there. The question will be whether AMD has enough capacity to justify making a powerful CPU-GPU combo for $10 profit each in the low-margin console market when they could sell the same processor in PCs and make a $100-$200 profit.