Manufacturing Roadmap
AMD finished things off with a brief update on its manufacturing. By the middle of this year AMD's Fab 36 will be completely transitioned over to 65nm, which is just in time for Barcelona to ramp up production.
By the middle of 2008, AMD plans on bringing 45nm to market, approximately 6 months after Intel does. Fab 36 will continue to be AMD's most advanced fab, with 45nm coming out of it starting in 2008 and by 2010 AMD expects to move the fab to 32nm.
AMD showed off the same 45nm SRAM test vehicle we saw over a year ago in Dresden, which is a bit bothersome. We expected to see more than what we had already seen, but it could be that AMD continues to be a bit more guarded than we'd like; either that or functional 45nm CPU silicon just isn't yielding yet.
Final Words
Needless to say, there's more to come and this is just the beginning. The fact that we can say this about AMD is an absolute shock to us, and possibly to you as well. For the longest time it seemed like the only CPU articles we'd write were either disappointing AMD product launches or exciting new Intel announcements. AMD is changing, arguably later than we'd like, but at least it's happening.
For a while we had lost confidence in AMD, like many of you had as well, and although AMD's position in the market hasn't changed we are more confident now that it can actually bounce back from this. Intel seemed to have the perfect roadmap with Conroe, Penryn and Nehalem all lined up back to back, and we saw little room for AMD to compete. Now, coming away from these meetings, we do believe that AMD may have a fighting chance. Over the coming months you'll begin to see why; it won't be an easy battle, but it will be one that will be fought with more than just price.
AMD's Fusion strategy looks to be an even stronger part of its future plans, if Phil Hester's prediction of a heterogeneous processing era comes true. While Intel has managed to deliver a much stronger CPU roadmap, we don't have much of an understanding of its answer to Fusion in the long term. AMD has very much been a leader in areas such as the move to 64-bit, an on-die memory controller, and now we may see the same leadership role with the move to integrate the CPU and GPU. The integrated CPU/GPU, taken to the exploitation stage as it was called by AMD, has the potential to really change the CPU as we know it. We do know that Intel has a response, but we're not as clear as to exactly what it is.
That being said, there's a lot that AMD has to do in the near term to ever get us to the point where the ATI acquisition could pay off. Barcelona is still at least a quarter away, we have no idea how it will actually perform, and AMD isn't giving us any indication. Despite a relatively weak introduction of Intel's latest Centrino platform, AMD still doesn't have a good competitor; while Fusion will give it a unique selling point into the mobile market, the first Fusion core is still well over a year away. The same worries we've had about AMD are still there; while we now know that AMD has some truly wonderful things planned for its future, we worry how great of a toll the interim will take on the company.
It is often said that what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger; despite losing $611 million dollars last quarter, and not winning a single performance benchmark since Intel launched its Core 2 processors, AMD is not dead. Market share is diminished, morale is low, but it may just be possible for AMD to come back from this stronger than ever. We're not exactly sure how AMD has lasted through all of this, but if it can pull through, we may once again have two very competitive manufacturers in the CPU industry.
AMD finished things off with a brief update on its manufacturing. By the middle of this year AMD's Fab 36 will be completely transitioned over to 65nm, which is just in time for Barcelona to ramp up production.
By the middle of 2008, AMD plans on bringing 45nm to market, approximately 6 months after Intel does. Fab 36 will continue to be AMD's most advanced fab, with 45nm coming out of it starting in 2008 and by 2010 AMD expects to move the fab to 32nm.
AMD showed off the same 45nm SRAM test vehicle we saw over a year ago in Dresden, which is a bit bothersome. We expected to see more than what we had already seen, but it could be that AMD continues to be a bit more guarded than we'd like; either that or functional 45nm CPU silicon just isn't yielding yet.
Final Words
Needless to say, there's more to come and this is just the beginning. The fact that we can say this about AMD is an absolute shock to us, and possibly to you as well. For the longest time it seemed like the only CPU articles we'd write were either disappointing AMD product launches or exciting new Intel announcements. AMD is changing, arguably later than we'd like, but at least it's happening.
For a while we had lost confidence in AMD, like many of you had as well, and although AMD's position in the market hasn't changed we are more confident now that it can actually bounce back from this. Intel seemed to have the perfect roadmap with Conroe, Penryn and Nehalem all lined up back to back, and we saw little room for AMD to compete. Now, coming away from these meetings, we do believe that AMD may have a fighting chance. Over the coming months you'll begin to see why; it won't be an easy battle, but it will be one that will be fought with more than just price.
AMD's Fusion strategy looks to be an even stronger part of its future plans, if Phil Hester's prediction of a heterogeneous processing era comes true. While Intel has managed to deliver a much stronger CPU roadmap, we don't have much of an understanding of its answer to Fusion in the long term. AMD has very much been a leader in areas such as the move to 64-bit, an on-die memory controller, and now we may see the same leadership role with the move to integrate the CPU and GPU. The integrated CPU/GPU, taken to the exploitation stage as it was called by AMD, has the potential to really change the CPU as we know it. We do know that Intel has a response, but we're not as clear as to exactly what it is.
That being said, there's a lot that AMD has to do in the near term to ever get us to the point where the ATI acquisition could pay off. Barcelona is still at least a quarter away, we have no idea how it will actually perform, and AMD isn't giving us any indication. Despite a relatively weak introduction of Intel's latest Centrino platform, AMD still doesn't have a good competitor; while Fusion will give it a unique selling point into the mobile market, the first Fusion core is still well over a year away. The same worries we've had about AMD are still there; while we now know that AMD has some truly wonderful things planned for its future, we worry how great of a toll the interim will take on the company.
It is often said that what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger; despite losing $611 million dollars last quarter, and not winning a single performance benchmark since Intel launched its Core 2 processors, AMD is not dead. Market share is diminished, morale is low, but it may just be possible for AMD to come back from this stronger than ever. We're not exactly sure how AMD has lasted through all of this, but if it can pull through, we may once again have two very competitive manufacturers in the CPU industry.
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osalcido - Sunday, May 13, 2007 - link
Like they price gouged when X2s were introduced?If so, I hope Intel kills them off. If I'm gonna get gouged I'd rather it be by a monopoly so maybe the government will do something about it
Spoelie - Sunday, May 13, 2007 - link
there was really no price gouging as far as I know. AMD was capacity constrained, they were selling every possible cpu they could make at those prices, and even had backorders. I remember that around the summer of 2005, they had sold out their capacity for at least the next 6 months.It would be absolutely economically INSANE to lower prices under those conditions. If you sell every single cpu you can make, you're not gonna lower prices to increase demand..
But well yeah, around feb 2006 came the news of core 2 ;)
Kougar - Sunday, May 13, 2007 - link
I'm not sure, but whatever image protection you are using to protect direct image linking seems to now be breaking ALL images in Opera. I have had problems in the past regarding Anandtech review/article images, but chalked it up to a browser setting I could not pin down.So far it still only happens with Anandtech images, and after a full reinstall of Opera 9.20 I still can't see any images or any image placeholders in this article. I did not know there was even any images until I got to page 7 where the captions were left hanging in midpage. I really hate having to switch to IE7 to read articles, so if this can be easily fixed I'd very much appreciate it. Thanks.
If it helps any, if I am looking for it I can sometimes spot an image start to load, before it is near instantly removed from the page and the text reshuffled to fill the empty void.
bigbrent88 - Sunday, May 13, 2007 - link
I know this may be a simple way to look at AMD's Fusion and future chips based on that idea, but isn't this close to what the Cell already is. Imagine you could remake the cell with a current C2D(using current power leader) and include more, better SPE's with something like HT in AM2 and all of this is on a smaller die than you could do now. Would that not be the basic first step they are going to take? Many have said the Cell is ahead of its time and I also agree that some design elements are inhibiting its overall power, but the success of Folding shows what the Cells processing can do in these types of environments and thats what AMD is looking at in the near term.I just can't wait to drop my x2 3800 and get a good upgrade to go along with that new DX10 card sometime in the next year. Bring it AMD!
noxipoo - Friday, May 11, 2007 - link
get everything in focus for christ sakes.plonk420 - Friday, May 11, 2007 - link
it's interesting how many commercial programs aren't multithreaded. take a look at this year's Breakpoint demos/intros, and just about ALL the top 3 or 5 (or more) take advantage of 2 cores (i don't have more than 2 to know if they would make use of the extra ones or not). check out the Breakpoint 2007 entries at pouet.net and fire something up with a Task Manager open on a second monitor and see for yourself ;)OcHungry - Friday, May 11, 2007 - link
From the tone of your article I have no doubt AMD is about to put Intel where it belongs, in the so so technology arena with lots of marketing maneuvering to sell inferior products. I like the Jetliner graph where the air bus is taking off at a steep angle and the other small jet is going horizontal w/a little inclination. That says it all, and how the 2 (Intel and AMD) are perceived in the technology world.It’s like this: Intel refines the same old, but AMD is into innovation and new things. Good for AMD, it’s about time. The heteroggenenous architecture, the fusion, and Torenza, are where computing technology should be heading, and AMD is taking the lead, as always. I live in Austin, TX, and have a few friends working @ AMD and tell me: buy AMD shares as much as you can, because good things are about to explode and neither Intel, nor Nvidia can catch up to it, ever.
sandpa - Friday, May 11, 2007 - link
actually they are asking everybody to buy AMD shares so that they can sell off their worthless AMD stock for a better price :) dont listen to them ... they are not your friends. No one will be able to catch up with AMD "ever" ??? yeah keep dreaming fanboi!OcHungry - Friday, May 11, 2007 - link
Yeah right. Tell that to Fidelity who bought more of AMD shares lately (13% total).And I guess the rise in price yesterday and today were meaningless?
Intel marketing thugs are at work, no change there.
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39...">http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39...
yyrkoon - Friday, May 11, 2007 - link
This is exactly what I was thinking while reading, then I ran into the above paragraph, and my suspicions were 'reinforced'. However, if this is the case, I can not help but wonder what will happen to nVidia. Will nVidia end up like 3dfx ? I guess only time will tell. There is a potential problem I am seeing here however, if we do finally get integrated graphics on the CPU die, what next ? Audio ? After a while this could be a problem for the consumer base, and may ressemble something along the lines of how a lot of Linux users view Microsoft, wit htheir 'Monopoly'. In the end, 'we' lose flexability, and possibly the freedom to choose what software that will actually run on our hardware. This is not to say, I buy into this beleif 100%, but it is a distinct possibility.
Apparently Intel suspects something is going on as well. One look at the current prices of the E6600 C2D should confirm this, as its currently half the price of what it was a month ago. Unless, there is something else I am missing, but the Extreme CPUs still seem to be hovering around ~$1000 usd.
I am very pleased to hear that AMD is continuing support for Socket AM2. It was my previous belief, that they were going to phase this socket out, for a newer socket, and if this was the case a few months ago, I am glad that they listen, and learn. Releasing products that underperform the competition is one thing, but alienating your user base is another . . . That being said, I really do hope that Barcelona/K10/whatever the hell the official name is, will give Intel some very tight competition (at least).
I can completely understand why AMD is being tight lipped, I have suspected the reasons why for some time now, and personally, I believe it to be in their best interrest to remain doing so. And yes, it may reflect badly on AMD at this point in time, but what would you preffer ? Intel learning your secretes, and thus rendering them moot, or a few 'whinners', such as ourselves, not knowing what is going on ? They are doing the right thing by them, and that is all that matters. No one, including Intel 'fanboys' want AMD to go under, they may think so, until it really does happen, then they are locked into whatever Intel deems nessisary, which is bad for everyone.
Now, if AMD could come up with something similar to vPro/AMT, or perhaps AMD/Intel could make a remote administration (BIOS, or similr level) 'Standard', I think I would be happy, for at least a little while . . .