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What are your longer-term aspirations in the server market? Is there any thought of doing a high-end, x86 chip that includes reliability features and capability features that a regular Opteron or Athlon may not have?
Hester: In general, the features that we add have played well in the server space and client space. There's more benefit in the server space, but it's actually more difficult to have two designs. It's easier just to have a single design that has all the high-end features in it, because you only have to validate one thing.
Are you looking at more than eight-processor machines?
This time next year, we will have a quad-core (chip), so an eight-processor system will be a 32-processor system. Probably 99.5 percent of all the servers in the world could be met by a machine of that capacity. We know how to do a glueless eight-socket system. We think, for at least the next couple of years, that is where the opportunity is.
If you look at the AMD-Intel race in the last few years, two factors played a big part: the changes at AMD, and Intel made a lot of mistakes--it did not, let's say, have the best chip in the world. Now it has a new family of chips that are getting good benchmarks. Is it going to get tougher for AMD to grow in the next couple of years?
Hester: In a healthy, fair and open environment with two strong competitors, you ought to be at a point where the products really compete with each other.
We had a period of time where it (Intel) just screwed up. I mean, I don't know how else to say it. It finally has responded to what we did roughly two or three years ago, but we've got our next generation coming out.
As long as there's a fair and open competition, it's a horse race between the two companies. And when we talked to the tier-1 (customers), that's what they want.
When I talk to customers, there are usually four or five different criteria that they use. Price is certainly one of them; performance is another one. What sort of innovation they can do in the platform is another.
Dell and IBM are probably good examples of companies that you know for sure are both our future roadmaps and Intel's, and they both chose to go with us for a broader and broader set of products. So, the way I read all that is we're doing the right thing across the board, right. It's not just performance; it's not just pricing.
Intel is going to continue to be aggressive. We're not at all confused about that, but we think we've got the right design points.
Another thing that comes up a lot is that AMD is talking a lot about incremental improvements for the basic architecture. Some people say that Intel plans to change architectures much faster and that AMD could fall behind technologically.
Hester: So what Intel actually is doing in my opinion is fixing a screw-up. If you look at the microarchitecture of the Core stuff, it looks a lot more like Pentium III. NetBurst (the underlying architecture of the Pentium 4) went off the deep end in terms of deep pipelining. It's a bad machine organization.
So they've had to go back and fix things that we never broke. There is nothing fundamentally broke with our core, and Intel is in a different position with NetBurst. That core was fundamentally broken, so (Intel) had to go fundamentally change it. And we never really went down that path. We went down a different path and said there's a balance between clock rate and parallelism.
There are certainly incremental changes you can make in the core, but the core itself is generally correct
With that in mind, how does the ATI acquisition contribute to that?
What's very interesting to us about the ATI acquisition is that now we can really make the right set of optimizations without artificial boundaries. There's a war right now between the CPU (central processing unit) and the GPU (graphics processing unit) guys, and to be honest, it's a bit of an artificial war. So a better approach is to be able to handle that stuff together where you can make the right trade-offs. If we need to move silicon between the CPU and the GPU, we can do that now.
Are there changes that you're planning to make to the core for the mobile space?
Hester: So, one of the areas that we need to work on as a company is the mobile space. And that's where the biggest win comes from being able to integrate the graphics.
Integration in the microprocessor itself or integration in the chipset?
Hester: Integration of the CPU and the GPU. Assuming the transaction closes on time, we would target a merged design in the 45-nanometer time frame.
Which is 2008?
Hester: Yeah. Some of the other things that are happening in the graphics space are that there's more and more programmability. It used to be that it was just polygon rendering. That's what graphics was, but now developers are doing so much programming.
The next generation of gaming is really making things more dynamic. It's not making the surface look realistic, but making it behave realistically. We've crossed the point where the GPU can do real programs of a significant size.
It may seem like 2008 is a long way away, but that's actually a major design cycle. ATI also has very good business, in both the handset and set-top box DTV area.
Are you looking at x86 in phones?
Hester: Yeah, absolutely. In high-end, high-function phones, it's driven by software. If you look at what's out there today, there's a number of embedded RISC (reduced instruction set computing) processors that are all fine. But as the software stack gets more complex, people want potentially to run the same applications.
Cell phones have been such a tough sell though. Intel landed the deal for the latest BlackBerry, but it's a rarity.
Hester: Again, if you go look at the processor architectures that are out there, there's a whole host of them. There's Power PC, Hitachi. What that says to me is today is not the right time to try to bring in an all-purpose architecture to that space. It's not needed yet. But as the software stack gets more and more complex, the software development environment becomes a bigger deal. Then the x86 is a good match.
CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.
See more CNET content tagged:
AMD, AMD Opteron, OEM, CTO, Intel
I see them moving towards the lucrative corporate server business and away from consumer products where they have a loyal fanbase.
The world is now dominated by PC and Mac Intel products which is just right what we need. 4 and 8 core is unnecessary, maybe in another 10 years when software and apps can play catch up
AMD, I am currently disappointed in your performance.
Instead, they probably need to shore up their mobile processor designs to match Intel on the power consumption front. Laptops are where the PC wars of the coming decades will be fought, as we are already seeing desktop variants of laptops ("home-use"/"non-portable" category).
Plus, with convergence set to become a reality finally in the next 5 yrs, power consumption will become very critical even for home-use systems!
Hester: We have.
Has it shown any interest?
Hester: I'd say interest, not necessarily any decisions.?
Now, the last time AMD talked to Apple was about 1.5 years ago. We haven?t heard from them ever since. So what is this Phil Hester talking about? At Apple we are baffled about his comments, and the only thing we can think of is that he?s spreading rumors before IDF ? the typical thing: stealing the thunder of another company. Is this guy a Chief Technology Officer or a bull **** artist?
As for CNETs questions, what do we think?. Enhancing unverified rumors clearly reveals a ludicrousness below Homer Simpson standard. We don?t care about them.
So, are these fabricated rumors true? Absolutely NOT. If Intel behaves like IBM, then we?ll reconsider AMD. Until than, AMD is permanently OUT OF THE PICTURE and we don?t care.
By the way, it?s very unwise for AMD cult to join the Apple cult. So don?t flatter yourself with gossip.
I am sure they must have had talks, and he honestly accepts that no decisions indeed. I just can't understand why people at Apple are furious upon this. If I believe you are correct then the matter would be raised by Mr. Jobs in a formal press release or something; not by Mr. domino360 in some unnoticed corner of the www.
I have still not forgotten the statements coming out of Dell before they finally decided to jump into the laps of AMD. However it was due to the fact that Dell's major products are computers and they just can't let themselves lag behind in the field. But Apple primarily being an online music (and other related products) company (as it has become now) can do well even while lagging in their part time products called computers.
depicted as a monoploy" . Look now. Also intel initally lagged behind in the multi-core products ( lagged behind Sun Micro systems which sell 8-core niagara servers, lagged behind AMD etc. ) area.
- Some things never change.
- by dmek69 October 30, 2006 12:02 PM PST
- It always amuses me to see how emotional people get in regards to the top PC manufacturers- AMD, Intel, Apple. Face it people, these companies don't need nor have time for such colorful banter. All anyone here can honestly give are opinions. When the time is right each company knows exactly what to do and when to do it, hence why they have all been around as long as they have. What makes any of you think all this press didn't come out for the shear reason of provoking these discussions anyway? LOL! They want to know what their next moves should be. I'm sure they thank you all. ;)
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