Manufacturing targets

As AMD explained its dual x86 vision, we saw two general categories forming. AMD called them the “factor of 10” approach. This approach indicates that a given design architecture can generally scale in power and performance by about a factor of 10 without significant redesign. This means at the low-end there will be x86 products in the 1-10 watt range (Bobcat). These will service products ranging from desktop appliances, high-end cellphones, digital TVs to other mobile products and more. At the higher-end, there will be the 10-100 watt range products (Bulldozer). These are for more traditional products, like desktops, notebooks, gaming machines, home media servers and even high-end servers.

AMD's modular approach has allowed the company to take a step back from its previous models and design goals. The firm has analyzed and realized that there's far more market potential for new products based on their baser resources applied through fundamental building blocks than was previously thought.

This was a powerful segment of the presentation and probably not only revealed to us what AMD sees as new, real potential. AMD's design team now sees base compute abilities and internal technologies as fundamentally mature components - those which can be wielded to leverage new products more quickly. AMD was able to ramp its 65nm production capacity from startup to mature yields in about 1,000 wafer starts, for example, we learned. That speedy ramp was absolutely unheard of in AMD's past and speaks very highly of the manufacturing process AMD has in place.

AMD showed a slide demonstrating that it took many 10s of times more wafers at previous process technology nodes to reach maturity. But now, thanks to much learning and the many manufacturing technologies AMD has invested in over several quarters with Fab36, it's beginning to pay off. AMD can now wield design components at a much higher level than was possible before. And it is this new manufacturing ability, coupled to the realization of heterogeneous computing (through the acquisition of ATI) which has now allowed AMD to realize a fuller potential.

AMD spent a great deal of the presentation going over this new realization. During the Q&A session at the end, one analyst asked Hector Ruiz about the change: “Last year it was all about marketshare, marketshare, marketshare. What's changed this year to place your focus away from marketshare and now on so many new products?” Ruiz replied that AMD has seen these new abilities emerging since the acquisition of ATI. The new compute technology bases being formed serve as the foundation of new abilities.

AMD also showed us how these new compute abilities are permeating into other industries. Hector and a representative from Microsoft both talked about how much the industry is in a state of change right now. One that's absolutely unprecedented. It was very clear that the absolute hard-and-fast reliable goals and visions of just a few years ago are now being migrated. Those previous components might now only be pieces of a larger vision. And where we are right now represents only a mere fraction of the potential. Again, it all stems back to the very dynamic and flexible modular design process AMD is operating under.


Acquisition of ATI

One of AMD's most strategic stated goals has been the acquisition of ATI. Ruiz indicated that AMD is completely happy with the ATI acquisition and transition. ATI brought a technology base to AMD that has served as a catalyst for new ideas and technologies.

Apparently, ATI's intellectual property influx has allowed what was previously a possible vision to now become an attainable reality. The various representatives from different departments each came up and explained the potentials there, both for their departments and AMD as a whole.

AMD (with ATI) presented a unity and focus on the future. There were some what we would consider powerful product possibilities being discussed. The teams working on them claimed to be focused and committed very solidly to the end goals.

AMD also indicated how much performance there is to be had in the GPU. They indicated the GPU shader units will continue to scale, that these resources will be leveraged for additional compute abilities and that there will always be discrete graphics components as well as Fusion-like technology. When asked about this, AMD responded by saying that the GPU itself can do things in a specialized way that cannot be done in a more generalized way via a Fusion-like engine. As such, the need for high-end GPU compute abilities will remain a goal for AMD.

In one demonstration, ATI showed 1.5 teraflops of runtime computing ability for a live demo with a lot of demanding 3D effects. It was part of a game which will be coming out before too long and showed a stunning 3D flight through a forest, over some water, past a bird in flight, through the grass and much more. Another demo showed a single machine doing gaming and realtime MPEG encoding on the frame-by-frame generated images for the game. That information was transmitted across a network to be shown on two other computers. It worked so smoothly on the single machine that it almost could not be understood what was taking place. But, according to AMD, it was doing 100% realtime encoding of the images while generating them. The presenter made a point of indicating just how compute intensive this was.

Read on the next page: New graphics abilities, customer focus, commercial commitment