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.
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Spoelie - Friday, November 14, 2008 - link
..Shanghai is it for the next 2 years?? That, except for some frequency bumps and a platform change to DDR3/HT3 (which will likely yield next to nothing on the desktop), they will be on a virtual standstill? For 2 years!Meanwhile Intel will have another tick and will replace Penryn (which Shanghai performs well against) with Nehalem (which it don't) top-to-bottom.
And by the time Bulldozer rolls in, it's tock time for Intel.
Somehow I'm disappointed.
mutarasector - Friday, November 14, 2008 - link
I was rather disappointed at this news as well. AM3 w/DDR3/HT3 was supposed to be available by Q2/Q3 2009...I was trying to decide between waiting for AM3 mobos, or a 790FX/SB750 mobo. Gigabyte doesn't have one just yet, and as far as I know, only Asus and Foxconn currently have a 790FX mobo paired up with an SB750 southbridge. I figured on waiting for AM3 mobos w/an improved SB800 southbridge, but now it looks like there will be a lot more time for more mobo makers to rework their existing 790FX boards with an updated SB750 southbridge.
Griswold - Friday, November 14, 2008 - link
You just dont know how things work when you're under financial pressure in horrific economy times like these. So it doesnt surprise me that you're disappointed.AMD is finally getting their act together with realistic goals and timelines and apparently a solid product on their hands.
sampsa5 - Friday, November 14, 2008 - link
Deneb features 8 MB of total cache.. not L3 cache:4 x 512 kb L2
6 MB L3
--------------
TOTAL: 8 MB
MadMan007 - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link
Please Please get your hands on the AVIVO transcoder. If it's not poor quality like Badaboom it will save me a lot of money because I will get a dual core instead of a quad :)If you can get it maybe give some feedback to AMD - make the encoder app semi-open. Allow plugins or extensions so people can use an encoding engine of their choice and make it usable for audio files as well. Not that the latter are slow but hey I've got a video card already right? That's in addition to overcoming the shortcomings of Badaboom like limited resolutions etc.
BigLan - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link
How is this new? There's been an avivo converter available for 3 years now, though I think it only works on x1x00 series (I couldn't get it to work on my 3850.)http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2645...">http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2645...
Griswold - Friday, November 14, 2008 - link
Why bother asking if you gave the answer yourself? It does not work with any of the current processing monsters - nuff said. I just hope it also works on the 3000 series - they've just announced it for the 4000 series of GPUs, which doesnt make a lot of sense to me, considering its the same architecture anyway.JarredWalton - Friday, November 14, 2008 - link
I don't believe the original AVIVO handles H.264 at all. I remember trying it, and it was quite fast... when it worked. Unfortunately, in my testing it failed on so many files that it was practically useless, and even when it worked the settings you could tweak were extremely limiting.JarredWalton - Friday, November 14, 2008 - link
Sorry - the linked article wasn't coming up, but I was at least partially wrong. H.264 in AVIVO was present, but the options and file support were still very flaky last I tried it. Admittedly, that *was* over two years back, though, so maybe it got better at some point.kuk - Thursday, November 13, 2008 - link
Hurray for the F1 naming scheme.