AMD: The Road Ahead by Anandtech

[Babrbarossa]

This article is just what I've been looking for for the last two months.

"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."


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[Scratch]

lol my father-in-law (president of PixelWorks) told me to expect something exceptional from the AMD aqcuisition of ATI and now that I see the intent I think it will be very intriguing to see the results

[Babrbarossa]

Pixelworks! So how come you aren't set up with a triple 32" LCD monitor setup?

[Scratch]

haha this guy is in China 98% of the time 1% on planes and maybe 1% at home lol my wife can't even get a hold of him and she has his cell#

[sswilson]

This is pretty well what I expected to see out of a merger between AMD & ATI, although I'm surprised that they're looking at direct integration as the ultimate goal.

I would have thought that the first step would have been integration through the chipset with it designed to offload CPU bound work packets to the gpu when it isn't being stressed.

Good to hear that they aren't sitting on their butts like it appeared that they might be.

[CMetaphor]

AMD has always come back from its weakest moments with flying colors. Remember the Introduction of the Athlon64 a few years back? The nearest thing intel had going for it at that time were the Heaters (aka prescotts) lol. Amd shall come back again, and then once again those "gotta have the absolute fastest" pc users will exodus back to AMD. You'll see, it'll happen. How exactly I dont know, but Ive always placed my gamble on AMD with keeping me up to date with technology, and i havent been disappointed yet.

[Babrbarossa]

I think their last victory arose from a combination of their own great work, and intel's shoddy work. I have a feeling that Intel won't be caught with it's pants down again for some time. So while I do think AMD will be able to compete, I don't see them kicking ass (like they did last year) in the forseeable future.

[CMetaphor]

But if the Future of PCs if having integrated graphics and/or physics processing onboard with the cpu then AMD is already a step up on Intel with the acquisition of ATI.... You never know, they might just come out with something so revolutionary Intel wont be able to answer back for years, lol.

[Babrbarossa]

I don't think the high-end will be the key to their sucess- it'll be cheapo all-in-one mobos: not glamorous but it's the largest portion of the market; and probably things like integrated graphics for laptops, cell phones and pdas and other things.

However, the problem is that they don't have any headway on Intel/Nvidia in these departments yet (although AMDs mobile processors will probably overtake Intel's mediochre celeron developments in $/performance if not sales), but some people interpret their silence to mean that they have secret aces up their sleeves- let's hope so- but one would think that at a time when they're trying with all their might to hold onto investors that they would want to leak out some hopeful news and show that they have a path that their confidently striding down.

[CMetaphor]

Ace in the HOLE!!! You know you wanted to say it.... And i Agree. AMD is up to something and should start giving their customers/investors some teasers soon before all the hardcore gamers go INTEL for their speed fix (like a drug,lol)