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Despite major layoffs last year, AMD is stepping forward with an impressive portfolio of initiatives and products for the next few years. Perhaps the most exciting initiative is the company’s Heterogeneous System Architecture plan.
For an in-depth look at AMD's new roadmap, see the gallery at the bottom of this page
HSA will eventually erase the line between the CPU and GPU and remove such painful tasks for programmers as juggling data between the CPU and GPU. That will happen by first allowing the GPU to access the CPU’s main memory. Eventually the CPU and GPU will use the same address space for memory too, making it easier still. That’s is the key promise behind HSA though—making it easier for programmers to access the parallel capabilities of a GPU. Another interesting aspect of HSA will be the ability to add third-party intellectual property or accelerators on an APU with HSA. AMD will try to garner industry support for HSA by making it an open standard and is inviting is competitors to adopt it as well.
AMD said its Brazos and Llano APUs were smash hits with 20 million Brazos chips and 10 million Llano chips shipping last year. The company says Brazos has been its most successful mobile processor to date. As such, the company has high expectations for its Brazos 2.0 and Trinity chips.
Brazos 2.0 will bring native USB 3.0 and improved performance-per-watt. E-series Brazos will come in at 18 TDP, C-series at 9 TDP and a new ultra low power chip called “Hondo” consuming 4.5 watts.
Trinity will use the company’s new Piledriver cores and is expected to increase performance 25 percent over an equivalent Llano processor with a new graphics core offering a 50 percent performance increase. AMD says Trinity will offer twice the performance-per-watt and promises “all day” use with more than 12 hours of battery life. It is a mobile versions of the Trinity that AMD is pushing for its Ultrathin initative – an alternative to Intel’s Ultrabooks. AMD says Trinity will allow notebook makers to push out quad-core APUs with 50 percent better graphics and better battery life than even Intel’s upcoming Ivy Bridge processor in a notebook just 18mm thick. To do that, AMD is now introducing a ball grid array or BGA version, instead of the traditional socket and pin design.
If you’ve wondered what AMD was doing pushing an alterantive to Intel and Apple’s Thunderbolt, the company made it clear with a demonstration of Lightning bolt. A Trinity-equipped notebook will let you plug in multiple monitors using a single DisplayPort 1.2 interface and play a Blu-ray movie across the integrated USB 3.0 interface.
Next year, AMD will introduce its “Sea Islands” GPU lineup. Fusion APU’s will see “Kaveri” on the performance segment with new Steamroller cores. We’ll also see low power “Kabini” using a new Jaguar core and a sequel to Hondo codenamed “TemasH’ will also be introduced. All will be based on a 28nm process. All of APU’s except Temash will feature HSA as well.
Notably absent was any announcements over the traditional meat-and-potatoes performance desktop processors. Officials mostly ignored AM3+ chips but did casually add that performance desktops will be fulfilled by Opteron. That means performance AMD fans will likely see the Opteron’s Piledriver, Steamroller and Excavator cores over time but it’s clear where AMD is putting its focus these days: APUs.
Comments are closed on this article
Jims45wow
February 07, 2012 at 6:01am
They quietly whacked Intel with FX. They might do it again someday.
Did anyone not see these curves (before)? This would be THE sandpit if everything else ran on gold. This is a good time to start paving it. Critics be damned.
They may not get it right the first few times around, but who does?
JohnP
February 05, 2012 at 9:31pm
Ouch. Here is a completely opposite view on what Gordon says is "impressive" and "exciting" i.e. Intel wins, AMD is out. Gordon, were you at this meeting? Did you get the same idea that AMD is getting out of the high end CPU market?
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/116977-goliath-wins-amd-retreats-retrenches-and-seeks-to-reinvent-itself
Ghost XFX
February 04, 2012 at 11:21am
Rory Read is focused. He's competent of the market's direction, and understands the demands that need to be met within AMD's limitations...
Question now will be: will AMD users embrace those limitations or not? AMD can't compete with Intel's "Old Money", it's simply a fact that can't be denied. It would take a grandiose CPU to even break even with Intel's lineup. The chances AMD bets the farm and house on doing such is nil. What they can do is find innovative ways to bring better performance to the average users and high end gamers alike at an affordable price. So I have to agree with their line of thought of bringing APU's to the forefront.
Naturally, Intel fans love to Nerd Bomb AMD every chance they get. They'll talk down anything AMD decides, no sooner it hits the net. Everything AMD does is ridiculous or factually insane. AMD will never be good enough in their minds. Personally, their "Mandark" attitude tends to lead to delirium. So why are AMD users hoping to compete with Intel directly?
JohnP
February 03, 2012 at 9:52pm
Man, if I had a dollar for every "new" computing architecture that has been touted in the past 30 years...
Lets see
Unified architecture. check
parallel capacities of the GPU. check
Unified memory structure. check.None of this is new, there are literally dozens of labs working on these exact ideas and probably already shipping product. AMD is trying to break into the very crowded "parallel supercomputer with massive number of CPU/GPU cores" business as they have already crowed about with their latest GPU core. Enough talk, more results please.
The rest is just hyping up their solid business on the low end laptop commodity market. They "shipped a lot!" And they have more low end designs for the future. The real question is can they make money with this business?
bpstone
February 03, 2012 at 4:21pm
I think from a developer's perspective there were good improvements made when comparing to their previous generation discrete GPUs. Nvidia probably will come out with a similar competitive product line, but they are late on the draw. You would not see much a difference on a standard gaming system running up to two 1920x1080 monitors. Stress all its components under a newer software environment with three+ 2560x1600 screens, then their true nature would be seen.
@LatiosXT
Purchasing should be based on your needs. Common sense for just about anything really. Anyone with the dough can throw a ridiculous amount of money at something. Driving exotics without [legally] opening the throttle or even never driving them at all is extremely dumb in my opinion. Etc. Yea, a GPC/workstation is extremely unnecessary if all you ever do is basic tasks. A netbook does that perfectly. ;)
JohnP
February 03, 2012 at 9:56pm
You bring up a point. Where is NVidia during all this AMD hoopla? There are articles every day about AMD this and AMD that, you think NVidia would want to throw some vaporware or leaked specs around to turn off some of this fan love.
I have this sneaking suspicion that both NVidia and Intel are setting up AMD to take a big fall when they get spanked by Ivy Bridge and Kepler.
LatiosXT
February 03, 2012 at 9:14am
I think AMD is missing the point here.
Give or take all of your programs that you have opened are I/O bound. They're just sitting around waiting for you to do something. And in fact, you probably want that, because if a program were CPU bound, it'd be crunching away and your power consumption jumps up. Especially on a portable system, you want the CPU to idle as much as possible.
Thus, since most CPUs are I/O bound, it doesn't matter how many cores you throw at it or what your computational prowess. At the end of the day, the CPU is parked, not doing anything at all.
I mean, this is great for supercomputers and mainframes that do a lot of simulations and numerical analysis, but for the average Joe checking his email and reading news websites, it's a complete waste of time.
praack
February 03, 2012 at 9:03am
though a good face saver for AMD, it is not looking pretty for the desktop segment at all.
Notebooks are not our thing, ball grid means no upgrade. and APU still means you need dedicated graphic for gaming.
with the Thuban die being phased out and the zambesi cores (even the quad and 6 variants) not = to the the thuban you are left with Intel usally a 60-100 markup for an unlocked processor. not to mention a higher price point for motherboards that have any real feature set.
As for Opteron- well the server side chips are not fairing well either sharing too much of the high tdp issues and poor threading issues.
will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next 3 years- will amd's vision hold true?
zepontiff
February 03, 2012 at 2:02pm
You don't "need" dedicated graphics for gaming. The A8 APU will play nearly every game out there. Now they will only crossfire with specific cards but there is still an upgrade path there.
illusionslayer
February 03, 2012 at 6:23am
"Most programs don't use more than one or two threads."
"LET'S ADD A TON MORE CORES, GUYS!"I love AMD's R&D team.
h e x e n
February 03, 2012 at 6:02am
Does kind of suck AMD is taking a short cut out of direct competition with Intel. Oh, how I long for the days of Athlon again. I had big hopes for Bulldozer until they got bulldozed when it finally came out.
Do have to hand it to AMD for always doing something a bit different than their competitor.
Gezzer
February 02, 2012 at 11:33pm
Wow, who didn't see all that coming?
It kind of reminds me how floating point became part of the CPU die. The only thing I'm a little puzzled by is AMD's take on what a performance system would use, a traditional multi-core CPU instead of the heterogenous one. I can't see why. I can see by 2015 the heterogenous design becoming the standard for all x86 processors it's just so much more efficient then using a lot of full x86 cores for any thing that is highly parallel in nature. So with that in mind how many full x86 cores will be the optimal amount? I mean my i7 875K only maximizes all the cores when I stress test it with P95 or something. So I can't see more then four maybe eight being needed. After that using the GPU cores would make more sense to me.
But then again I could be wrong. Wouldn't be the first time.P.S. I wonder if Intel is paying attention this time? AMD's on die memory controller gave them a massive jump over Intel IMHO. It took Intel using a mobile design to get them back in the game. Could be really interesting.
zepontiff
February 02, 2012 at 6:49pm
I had resisted getting a laptop forever because to game on them you had to spend huge. I finally caved and after researching bought a $300 e-350 lenovo machine. It is good enough to play games on and having it hooked up to my TV in the living room is great.
Unfortunately it has now made me want to spend more money on a HTPC built on the llano chip!
I think this is a good route for amd.
