Newsmaker: AMD's man of the future

Advanced Micro Devices might not be planning a huge change in the way it makes chips this year, but that doesn't mean Phil Hester doesn't have a lot on his mind.

The new chief technology officer went to AMD last year from Newisys, an early designer of servers built with AMD's Opteron processor. He is responsible for the direction of AMD's overall chip design strategy, which encompasses everything from servers to PCs to newer devices that haven't really gone beyond the drawing board.

On Thursday, the chipmaker is holding a half-day meeting for analysts at its headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., where new details are expected to be revealed about its road map and future direction. Any announcements will receive intense scrutiny, as many people are wondering what AMD has in store for its next trick. It has announced plans for only minor changes this year, such as DDR2 memory support, as it prepares for a new architecture in 2007.

In just a few short years, AMD has moved from a niche player known mostly to gamers to a supplier to Fortune 500 companies across the world, even convincing longtime holdout Dell to build a server based on its Opteron chip earlier this month. Its market share among retail PCs has also increased over the past year, actually exceeding Intel's share at certain points in the U.S. market. But Intel is declaring that it is back, with the pending launch of new processors based on a more power-efficient architecture.

At the Future in Review conference in Coronado, Calif., recently, Hester sat down with CNET News.com to discuss how AMD is helping the software industry deal with multiple processing cores and gave his take on the hot conference topic, computers for the developing world.

Q:When it comes to client software, what is your role in getting the industry ready for the multicore era?
We spend a lot of time really trying to understand the end-user scenarios of "what is the application going to be like that these people would use? And what software characteristics do those applications have?"

If you look at it in the server space, I would argue that more or less all the contemporary applications have been developed for multiprocessing environment. Multicore is just a different way to package that up, and so the server software works well in a multicore environment.

You can't say the same thing about the client software, because you go back 20-plus years down the PC and the client applications, and--other than the possible exception of high-end workstation, dual-processor stuff--those applications always have benefited from single-threaded performance improvements in the processor.

Now that game has got to change. If you look at what's happening in the server side of things, you've seen companies build specialized accelerators for things like Java and XML, and the ability to easily add these customized processing blocks around a dual-purpose core processor is something that we think it?s very important. You'll see us do more and talk a quite a bit about that at the upcoming analyst meeting.

It seems that quad-core designs are going to be the way to go for a while. But then some people have started to wonder if you will get into a core race, the way you got into a gigahertz race.
There are only two ways to go faster: Better single-threaded performers or more multithreaded performers. I mean, that's it--those are the two vectors. So the question then becomes, what's the balance between those two? Where we tend to lean right now is that across dual workloads, you could in fact create more cores than you would see a benefit from.

That gets back to discussion about the evolution of the software that's in the client space. For sure, there has got to be thought given about the performance of things beyond quad-core.

More Newsmakers

[sexlove2046]

dual-core

i like dual-core pc

[NRecob]

My Opeteron ROCKS

I love my Opteron 175-it leaves my old Intel P4 2.6HT in the DUST.

[sexlove2046]

dual-core

i like dual-core pc

[NRecob]

My Opeteron ROCKS

I love my Opteron 175-it leaves my old Intel P4 2.6HT in the DUST.

[baswwe]

AMD RULEZ

dual core quad core sex core

you name it they are the best

[baswwe]

AMD RULEZ

dual core quad core sex core

you name it they are the best

[NRecob]

INTEL=REAR VIEW MIRROR/ OPTERON=RULES

AMD IS KICKING INTEL'S A$$. NOBODY BUT N00BIES BUY INTEL ANYMORE.

OPTERON RULES!

[NRecob]

INTEL=REAR VIEW MIRROR/ OPTERON=RULES

AMD IS KICKING INTEL'S A$$. NOBODY BUT N00BIES BUY INTEL ANYMORE.

OPTERON RULES!

[Blito]

Stealing chips?

"You also have to deal with the protection of components. When you first get a lot of these devices, someone other than you is on the hook for the liability of the cost. You are in there, you pay for it over time, right, but there is a phenomena that can happen like stripping cars. If somebody steals it, tries to take the components out and sell the components as individual piece parts, for some period of time, there is a higher value in trying to do that than in protecting the device. So you need to think about how you protect the components of these systems to do as much as possible to prevent that sort of thing from happening."

I understand if they are selling it AMD should take a share of the profits but taking the chips out is another matter that isn't stealing other then breaking the AMD warrenty. They shouldn't create a total Orwellian Thin Client scenrio totally either; although it would be good in allot of other minor ways.

If AMD is going open source the specs on it's co-processors that could be a good thing for them against Intel.

[Blito]

Stealing chips?

"You also have to deal with the protection of components. When you first get a lot of these devices, someone other than you is on the hook for the liability of the cost. You are in there, you pay for it over time, right, but there is a phenomena that can happen like stripping cars. If somebody steals it, tries to take the components out and sell the components as individual piece parts, for some period of time, there is a higher value in trying to do that than in protecting the device. So you need to think about how you protect the components of these systems to do as much as possible to prevent that sort of thing from happening."

I understand if they are selling it AMD should take a share of the profits but taking the chips out is another matter that isn't stealing other then breaking the AMD warrenty. They shouldn't create a total Orwellian Thin Client scenrio totally either; although it would be good in allot of other minor ways.

If AMD is going open source the specs on it's co-processors that could be a good thing for them against Intel.

[ilover2]

Conroe is gonna getch ya

watch out slow mo

[ilover2]

Conroe is gonna getch ya

watch out slow mo