AMD - The Road Ahead
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.
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