AMD Talks Phenom II, Roadmaps and More at Fall 2008 Financial Analyst Day
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 13, 2008 1:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Today is AMD's Financial Analyst Day at AMD's campus in Sunnyvale, CA. I'm not a financial analyst but there are some useful tidbits that are coming out of the presentations today. Obviously the focus at AMD these days is returning to profitability and with the planned spinoff of its manufacturing business, this should be possible.
AMD was quick to point out that it only has one competitor in the CPU space and one competitor in the GPU space. There are very few markets where there are only two competitors, which led to the following statement: "We ought to be able to make money, and we can make money".
Manufacturing is going to be an important topic today and AMD plainly laid out its manufacturing transitions for next year: AMD is going to move chipsets to 45nm in 2009, graphics will be pushed down to 40nm, and we'll see 32nm designs completed for production in 2010.
I'm not sure if I'm reading this correctly but it appears to say that AMD's marketing strategy for North America is graphics-exclusive, with no real Phenom focus. The important disclosures thus far have been in the roadmaps however.
The Server Roadmap
Today AMD launched its Shanghai processor, the 45nm follow-on to last year's Barcelona. We also got a brief update on its server roadmap:
In the 2nd half of 2009 we'll see Istanbul, a 6-core 45nm product that will work in current sockets for Barcelona/Shanghai. In 2010 we'll see 8-core and 12-core solutions with up to four DDR3 memory channels and four Hyper Transport links.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
40 Comments
View All Comments
hechacker1 - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link
The iphone/ipod touch has a h.264 decoding chip. The main reason for support is battery life and higher quality for a given file size. it also uses YouTube's h.264 videos (a.k.a high quality videos).The iphone supports 640x352 maximum (I encoded for the maximum target). The screen is 480x320.
JarredWalton - Friday, November 14, 2008 - link
Ah... targeting 640x352 is a huge difference from 1920x1080. I'm not positive on this, but I'm pretty sure encoding times scale linearly with resolution under H.264. So, based on that, 1080P encoding would require 9.20 times longer than 640x352 encoding. It may not be *exactly* nine times longer - depending on quality settings among other things - but for sure the higher resolution encode is more processor intensive.overzealot - Saturday, November 15, 2008 - link
My experience with h264 encoding follows your theory, fairly linear increase in encode time.It's worth noting that Nero AVC quality is quite average. It is to h264 what xing was to mp3 encoding. It gets the job done fast, but at what cost?
Agitated - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link
I may have missed this since I'm reading the article on a blackberry but was there any mention of them throwing out an am2 socket 45nm quad core opteron?pugster - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link
Today they can scrap up something to compete with the Intel Atom processor but they didn't. Even ARM is doing it. I guess they don't get the hint.teldar - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link
I don't think they have the development budget for ANYTHING right now that's not going to make some real money. Even Intel SAYS they aren't making as much because ATOM is taking sales away from higher margin parts.That's really not a market segment AMD can get into right now. Maybe if they make some money for a few quarters... But I'll believe all this when I see it.
T
Griswold - Friday, November 14, 2008 - link
Humm no, Intel never said that. Its just a theorie that didnt show up in hard numbers in their reports yet (albeit, its a theory that isnt too far stretched).R3MF - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link
A netbook format, but not using the fusion CPU/GPU single package, i wonder what it is............low-power dual-core Phenom II at .045u and probably around 1.6GHz
low-power 780G chipset at .055u, hopefully paired with the SB750
Could be a very compelling product when put in a 10" chassis!
3DoubleD - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link
I'd put my money on downclocked, super low voltage dual core athlons. It was demonstrated not so long ago that such an Athlon chip running below 10 Watts wipes the floor with the Intel Atom. Personally, I don't buy into the whole netbook thing, but I think this is the right way to go for AMD. I feel like I pioneered the idea when I assembled a 12.1" laptop (from a barebones kit) with the slowest (eg. lowest power components) available ~4 years ago. I was able to get ~7 hours of battery life at only ~4lbs. Having said that, I would not trade any more performance for power savings if I did it again. Getting any smaller than 12.1 inches is also crazy unless you are planning to only use it for web surfing. I don't see the allure of paying all that money for something that just browses the web. I understand the desire to bring a laptop everywhere, but it should be useful, that's why I think the super low power X2 Athlon would be a good call.On that note, I don't think that Phenom can be low power enough to suit their needs. AMD is really really good at making Athlons, which is why they can run so low power.
teldar - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link
I would love to have something similar to the eee but actaully with a little bit of power. But that's me as a student right now. It would be nice to be able to pull up the prof's power points during class and add notes by typing rather than writing. And it would let me get some other things done while sitting in class when there's not a whole lot of info being disbursed.But it would be nice as well if it could get a couple things done at the same time. Not an option with the atom netbooks.