AMD Analyst Day Platform Announcements

Final Words

While AMD touched on an incredibly vast amount of technology and data over the course of their 3 hour webcast, the depth of each branch was not nearly enough to satisfy our tastes. We are in the process of scheduling briefings with as many AMD engineers as possible in order to get our questions answered, and we will certainly report on the details of our research as soon as we are able. Hopefully next week's Computex will be very fruitful on the AMD front.

We can't be too upset over the lack of detail though. In fact, for a day designed around presenting technology to analysts, AMD was pretty heavy on the technology and architecture. Now that they've officially confirmed some of the key features of their next gen processor and platform technology, we certainly hope they will be able to back up their claims with real architectural data on the hardware.

In the meantime, we can all dream sweet dreams over the possibilities AMD's Torrenza presents. Giving expansion cards the bandwidth and low latency of an HTX connection with the ability to support coherent HyperTransport will enable hardware vendors to create a new class of expansion card. Though AMD likes to call these "accelerators," we'll try our best to steer clear of buzz words and marketing speak. Suffice it to say that giving hardware vendors the capability of accessing any CPU or memory in the system directly with cache coherency should really shake things up. The advantages are probably most apparent to the HPC market, where HTX can offer an easy and standard way to add custom FPGAs or very specialized hardware to a massive system. However, there are absolutely advantages out there for those who want to build hardware to really work in lock-step with the CPU.

This applies directly to companies like AGEIA with their PhysX card which, when used in a game, must communicate bi-directionally with the CPU before a frame can be sent to the GPU for rendering. Additionally, GPU makers could easily take advantage of this technology to tie the graphics card even more tightly to the CPU and system memory. In fact, this would serve to eliminate one of the largest differences between PCs and game consoles. The major advantage that still remains on console systems (aside from their limited need for backwards compatibility compared to the PC) is the distance from the CPU to the GPU. There is huge bandwidth and low latency between these two subsystems in a console, and many games are written to take advantage of (or even depend on) the ability to actively share the rendering workload between the CPU and GPU on a very low level. Won't it be ironic if we start seeing high performance Xbox 360 and PS3 emulators only a couple years after their release? This is the kind of thing that could make it possible.

With Torrenza and the introduction of 4x4 in the consumer space, it seems clear that AMD will be offering consumer level CPUs with multiple external coherent HyperTransport channels. As the lack thereof has been the only limitation keeping us from building multiple processor systems with consumer products, we have to wonder how AMD will really differentiate its server and workstation parts this time around. Out of the gate, the K8L Opteron will be a 4 core part, while the desktop chip will only have 2, but eventually the desktop will support 4 cores as well. Will we start to see more specialized hardware "accelerators" on Opteron chips, or will we see more I/O oriented modules? Will HT-3's link unganging to allow 2 8bit links for every 16bit link only be available on the high end parts? AMD's leadership in performance in the 2P and 4P workstation market has been very solid since the beginning of Opteron, and we are excited to see the ways AMD will attempt to continue this trend.

The final word on AMD's Analyst Day? Performance. It's pure and simple, and AMD is all about it. On the high end it's 4x4 or 8 coherent HT links, and on the mobile side, its performance per Watt. By 2008, AMD hopes that 1/3 of the market place will let the world know that they've still got solid performance for the mainstream at good prices as well. The next gen CPU market will certainly be exciting to watch.