AMD Details Roadmap: Barcelona And Beyond

AMD (AMD) executives were holding court Thursday at the company’s Sunnyvale, CA headquarters before an audience of press and analysts. Of late, AMD has been taking some belly punches as arch rival Intel (INTC) has gained momentum. Last quarter, AMD posted its third quarterly loss in a row, with a loss of $600 million, although revenue increased 13 percent from a year earlier. Shares of AMD have fallen as Intel’s have risen. (See Tom Krazit’s story on AMD vs. Intel.)

AMD’s strategy has three vectors, according to Dirk Meyer, president and COO: energy efficient processing, ultimate visual experience and affordable Internet access.

The overriding message from AMD, as artculated by Henri Richard, executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer, was that ultimately AMD will win versus Intel. Richard cited customer preference for AMD, more OEMs adopting AMD and employees as elements that will change AMD’s fortunes.

The marketeer claimed that the substantial growth AMD has had during his five years at AMD will be dwarfed by the growth in the next five years. He also pointed to AMD’s recent endorsement by Gartner, more retail coverage and design wins with Dell (DELL) and Toshiba (TOSBF.PK) as signs of strength. He took a jab at Intel, claiming that AMD allows OEMs freedom to create more distinctive products than they could working with Intel. AMD has no “monopoly tax,” Richard said.

Following Richard, Randy Allen, corporate vice president of AMD’s server and workstation division, described AMD’s processor roadmap, which is where the rubber meets the road versus Intel. Barcelona, Shanghai and the third generation, Sandtiger processor due in 2009. Barcelona, AMD’s 65 nanometer quad-core chip, will start shipping this quarter at 2.0 GHz, with a faster version due in Q4. Some analysts have said at 2.0 GHz, AMD’s performance will trail Intel’s forthcoming quad-core, which will be based on 45 nanometer technology.

Shanghai will be AMD’s 45-nanometer version of Barcelona and is due in the second half of 2008, and will include an increased cache size and improved core architecture.
AMD is developing a new core architecture due in 2009, which will include Hypertransport 3 and DirectConnect 2, which ups Hypertransport links on each chip from three to four and will include an AMD-designed server chipset, partnering with Broadcom (BRCM) and Nvidia (NVDA). In addition, it will support DDR3 memory, the G3 memory extender, PCI 2.0 and IOMMU.

AMD also shed light on its new core for the next-generation AMD server processors. Bulldozer is the new core, targeting clients and servers built from the ground up, according to AMD CTO Phil Hester. Bulldozer also is focused on increasing performance per watt throughput, continued scaling for single thread performance and partitioning for future scalability and modularity, he said.

AMD is developing Bobcat, a new core for mobile, ultra mobile and consumer electronics systems. Hester said that software has reached a tipping point in those kinds of devices, and there is a need for a more general purpose processor rather than embedded processors for the IPTV era. Bobcat is also expected in products in 2009, Hester added.

In addition, AMD is working on a ‘fused’ client, based on Bulldozer that has a tighter relationship with the GPU (graphics processing unit). “If you put together on silicon the CPU and GPU with a common memory interface, you can set a new standard in terms of efficiency,” Hester said.

With Barcelona, AMD will regain performance leadership and will be able to control pricing for a while, versus Intel, which has been hammering AMD on pricing at the low end processor segment, said industry analyst Nathan Brookwood of Insight 64.

“It looks like AMD is trying to match Intel in terms of both two-year cadence in process manufacturing cycles and in developing new cores. AMD didn’t call its new core “tic-tock” like Intel. It will be interesting if either one can clean the others’ clock,” Brookwood quipped.

Brookwood was also impressed by Barcelona’s performance.

They finally put at least one stake in the ground with SPECfp_rate2006 benchmark. The 69.5 score is the highest posted for a single chip so far. The 2.0 GHz Barcelona had a 30 percent per watt advantage versus Intel’s Xeon 5345 quad core. It’s dramatically better than Xeon and better by 20 percent over the IBM (IBM) Power6, the previous leader in the benchmark. It’s clear the technical computing crowd is going to love this chip.

In that vein, the Texas Advanced Computing Center is working with Sun (SUNW) and AMD to create a Barcelona-based supercomputer that takes advantage of the processor’s scalability and system architecture. Regarding Bobcat, AMD’s new core designed for mobile and consumer electronic devices, Brookwood said that AMD has more to bring to a system on a chip design than Intel because of its acquisition of ATI.

Comments

[Wannabe Maven:]

One benchmark, against a competitor's older part (why not benchmark against Xeon X5365) for a product that's supposed to be launched in a month? Talk is cheap. Show me the money.

2007 Jul 27 10:49 AM