AMD - Loaded and Back in Action

An Overview and Signs of Hope

2007 was a trying year for AMD. Processors that were once top of the line, were knocked down to mid-range and value parts as Intel ploughed through with their Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad processors, while graphics cards that were among the more competitive options played second fiddle when NVIDIA delivered their GeForce 8 lineup. AMD's Barcelona that was hailed to turn around AMD's misfortune was met with the dreaded TLB bug that further delayed mass market delivery. Their notebook platform refresh missed a beat, and more so with their mobility Radeon graphics chips. With all these delays and setbacks affecting their once leading positions, their market share in certain segments shrunk and their financial books were tainted red for several quarters following the US$5.4 billion dollar deal to acquire ATI in late 2006.

All that only seemed to spell danger for AMD, but is it what it seems? Amid all the troubles and getting ATI integrated as part of AMD, they did however come out as a much stronger company - and one that seems poised to take on its adversaries. As a company that owns its own wafer fabrication plants (in addition to contracting out to external foundries for greater volume), the second largest designer and supplier of CPUs, the second strongest visualization solutions provider and their very own motherboard/chipset design team, this is a combination that's hard to beat as they can offer a complete systems solution. Short of supplying storage, optics, screens and power supplies, they research, design and produce the heart and brains of a typical computer system, be it at the personal computer level or that of servers in data centers.

Today, AMD's competitive position is perhaps the strongest in the last two years and that's just based on recent developments in the first quarter of 2008. Breaking down what has happened recently, the company managed to roll out its complete lineup of Radeon HD 3000 series of graphics processors, launched the new AMD 780G and 780V chipsets for the new mainstream and business computers, and has managed to deliver the updated Phenom '50' series of processors that use the new B3 silicon revision. Correspondingly, this also means the Opteron processors are now shipping for mass availability in addition to its close OEM partners. All of these developments are really much awaited entries for AMD to get back into the market and from what we heard at a recent AMD media briefing, it looks like exciting times are ahead.

We managed to catch up with several of AMD's top executives such as John Taylor, AMD's Director for Product and Strategic Communications, as well as Bryan Low, Vice President and Managing Director of AMD in South Asia, to better understand where AMD is today. So read on and be surprised what's in the pipeline. It may not break Intel or NVIDIA yet, but AMD will surely give them something to think about.

The Tale of the Barcelona - Then and Now

At the time of launch, Barcelona's significant marketing tagline was that it's the first native x86 quad-core design (it still is) and its debut also signaled that the consumer-based quad-core Phenom processor was in the wings. Barcelona being a workstation/server oriented processor, it had a very long validation process. During that process, AMD obtained feedback from some of their partners they were working with on issues that they couldn't quite pin the culprit upon (which we all now understand as the TLB bug issue with regards to system stability). This actually took them a month or two to figure things out - that's when they put word to the market that they weren't going to see Barcelona as fast as they initially thought so. Once the issue was confirmed, AMD wasn't delivering Barcelona processors for general availability because they weren't able to give the full assurance of the absolute reliability that their customers would expect of their Opteron processors.

So while AMD wasn't providing for general availability, they were in direct communication with some of their very large customers who purchase tens or hundreds of thousands of Opteron processors to whom AMD was able to relate the exact issue that they are seeing and that in a Linux environment, all they had to do was to install a patch to circumvent the issue with zero performance penalty and they wouldn't see the issue. Those are the customers who felt that it was worthwhile to still pursue with the earlier batch of Barcelona processors and they bought them up.

Meanwhile, AMD did work with all other vendors and OEMs with the existing silicon to ensure the Barcelona met their internal proposed needs and validation. So when the revised B3 silicon comes in, they would have a much quicker validation process and move with their proposed upgrade/migration/deployment of newer servers. After-all, the Barcelona didn't require any new platforms anyway. So there is pent-up demand for the newly revised Opteron processors since in the server world, customers don't necessarily jump platforms completely and many rather wait up till the newer processors are launched - more so again because the Barcelona can be plugged into existing Opteron platforms supporting registered DDR2 memory (effectively their second generation platforms). So AMD expects a huge surge in sales as well as market share - to the point that they believe they would out be of the red by the next quarter. It's definitely a bold statement of confidence and we really hope to hear that from the next quarter's financial update.

If you're wondering if there would be tri-core Opteron processors, John highlighted that the triple-core products are squarely aimed at the consumer segment and they don't expect to roll these product for the server side. Probably one of the reasons of this decision could lie in the fact that the triple-core processors are actual quad-core products with a defective core, hence it makes sense to exclude this in more critical environments.

Of Phenoms and the Triple-Core Proposition

When we queried of the state of the Phenom processors and its limited availability previously, AMD was quick to mention of sales allocation issues in various regions that attributed to this anomaly. While we think there are other reasons like limited yields, that's all behind us now and the situation is quite different with Phenom processors in good availability in most places.

While we've tested and reviews both the Phenom X4 and X3 processors in detail, we've not been impressed by its price-performance point, nor its power consumption figures. This is certainly true from our testing matrix when focusing solely on the processor's capabilities. However, AMD has another view of its processors - especially when taking the view of the entire platform proposition. To understand this angle better, you'll have to step out from your enthusiast shoes, and slip on some comfortable mainstream user's sandals. The point that AMD is driving is its balanced PC platform strategy that dictates the presence of an equally strong CPU, chipset and graphics subsystems at compelling price points and this perhaps is an important key to understanding where its current crop of offering shine best - commercial business systems and the mainstream retail business.

Face it folks, the chances of a retail desktop system based on an Intel processor with Intel's integrated graphics is far more likely than it being configured with a more expensive discrete graphics card option. We all know how miserable Intel's integrated graphics is and that alone is enough to drag the entire system's multimedia and gaming capabilities - it's an all too familiar scenario of the retail world where a fast processor is tagged to one of the slowest graphics engines out there. And there is a huge buyer base of such systems because they are affordable. According to stats shared by John, 97 out of every 100 computers sold in the US don't come with discrete graphics. General retail consumers don't deal with component price lists like enthusiasts; they just make-do with very light superficially research. The fact of the matter is that the retail PCs don't sell that many quad-core systems with discrete graphics, so most people don't spend that much money.

We've already seen what AMD's older 690G platform was capable of and it is very decent for multimedia. Now with the newer AMD 780G platform, it boasts of Blu-ray playback capabilities with all CODEC types (thanks to the IGP's integrated UVD stack) and much better 3D graphics horsepower. Pair that with AMD's processors and it will still perform much better than Intel's fast Core 2 Duo/Quad with Intel's IGP whose drivers are in desperate need of help since yesteryears. So when you re-look at the overall platform performance of an Intel and AMD system based on just integrated graphics, AMD has a much better performance and price standings.

Consumer's perception also adds to the equation here. A typical end-user's comparison and conversation with the store owner in retail store could be that one is looking for a system and finds an Intel quad-core system to be a little pricey (perhaps $1000 and upwards), but an Intel dual-core being more affordable at perhaps the $700 price point. Now at a similar price-point, an AMD machine perhaps offers a triple-core system (based on the AMD 780G) and additionally is able to provide better video processing and graphics performance - so that's a win-win scenario for the consumer. To the consumer, he/she seems to be getting a much better deal and they really are in this scenario.

Of course, if the customer is ignorant of other options besides Intel and doesn't test-ride the systems to find out firsthand or the shop assistants don't run any demos, this sort of sale would be hard to come by for AMD. However, as discussed here, from the technical standpoint, AMD now has a really compelling argument. Now it's up to their marketing to get into gear, else these salient points would just erode under Intel's branding/marketing. Nothing beats a good advertising campaign to set things in motion.

New Phenom Developments and 45nm "Stars" Cores

When we probed AMD if we would ever see a 3GHz Phenom in retail since clock speed is something they could really use now, John Taylor had the following comment on it:-

"That's something that we're looking at right now. As you know, you can overclock a Phenom X4 9850 stably to 3GHz or more. We've some secret things in the works that you'll here more about later this quarter; that will allow people to get significantly above 3GHz even with a Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition. These are things we're doing more at the chipset level and some updates to some chipsets coming soon. So watch that space; I've said too much already, but you'll see significantly above 3GHz performance from Phenoms for those who really understand and know what they are doing when overclocking."

So there you have it - interesting developments coming our way, direct from the source (though we've not heard much of Phenoms making it past 3GHz normally). Now, AMD being a smaller company than its competitor in both resources and finances, it has to optimize the use of its engineering resources. So while they would like to make a 3GHz Phenom right now, they've tradeoffs to make. Right now, its OEM partners/customers just want more processors, but they aren't asking for a 3GHz Phenom since they don't sell such high-speed quad-core machines and only those who deal in the boutique end of the market selling $3000 to $4000 machines to gamers really deal with this sort of needs. AMD explained that their major partners like HP, Dell, Lenovo and others aren't asking for 3GHz quad-core Phenom processors. However, they are requesting for ever more energy efficient chips, so that they can keep making machines smaller and cooler. For the moment in this quarter, AMD will be pushing out a 2.6GHz Phenom 9950 which will be 100MHz speedier than the current 9850 Black Edition. While it won't break any records from what we've seen in its performance by means of the unreleased Phenom 9900, it's nonetheless a step in the right direction for them.

Even if their OEM's aren't demanding high-speed processors, as they deal with more mainstream volume movement, AMD's upcoming transition to the 45nm process technology (also often know as the "Stars" core update on the desktop side and "Shanghai" on the server side) is another reason why they can't entirely devote themselves to cranking higher clocked Phenoms. John commented that they've a lot of engineering resources channeled in this area as they are committed to getting it out right and want a clean launch and delivery execution. Of course they are doing more than just transitioning to a 45nm process, as they have some core enhancements, 6MB of L3 cache, supports DDR3-1333 memory and comes in a new AM3 socket packaging (which is fortunately backwards compatible with older platforms like AM2 and AM2+). By AMD's estimation, a 2.6GHz Phenom today, when making the jump to the new 45nm process node, should perform 10 to 20% better. So a 2.6GHz 45nm Phenom later this year would perform about the same as a 2.8GHz Phenom of the current generation. While most of the performance gain is mainly attributed to the enlarged L3 cache (still using the same exclusive caching policy), the gains sound much more than what Intel got when making their transition to 45nm. We'll check these claims when the processor becomes available, but yet another salient point about the transition is that AMD can bring down the wattage further on some of their processors.

So right now, they are at a juncture if they should introduce higher clocked SKUs of the existing 65nm quad-core processors or stay put and shift their engineering resources to delivering their newer 45nm processors which should hopefully give a notable performance boost at even the same clocks speeds. So that's something they'll figure out along the way as they get more industry feedback on what they require. By third quarter of this year, we should be able to get a clearer picture of the situation and their direction.

New CPU and Platform Synergies

If you recall some two years back, AMD debuted their much publicized of creating specialized co-processors in an AMD platform. However that has pretty much fizzled out of spotlight and there have been several references as of late on AMD's headway into Accelerated Processing Units (APU). So how do these two developments differ when both are supposed to assist in accelerated processing? We touched on these subjects as well with John to get a better understanding of where AMD is heading.

First off, the Torrenza initiative was about opening up their architecture, whether one wanted to expand via the PCI slot, PCI Express, and enabling much greater acceleration for specific tasks rather than having another general purpose core or higher frequencies as compared to a co-processor where far greater gains can be made.

The whole trick of all these various forms of accelerated processors/co-processors is getting the software to recognize these hardware capabilities. AMD is putting a lot resources (and energy) into working with Microsoft, the Linux community and software developers to unlock the future of accelerated computing with Torrenza and Stream processor cards being plugged into.

The first generation or example of accelerated processing units (APUs) will be the Fusion initiative itself which would take AMD's next generation graphics core that has not yet been announced and integrate it along with two Phenom-architecture based cores. AMD predicts that this will undoubtedly consume a much lower wattage and enable a much simpler notebook hardware platform. The chipset probably doesn't exist in this platform. Everything is integrated in that CPU and they can be much more competitive in the Thin-and-Light notebook market segment. The real promise comes about in unlocking the GPU to perform more general purpose computing tasks, which was what the Torrenza, Stream and APU initiative was about.

AMD isn't the only one hoping to unlock the GPU with their CTM interface because NVIDIA is also hard at work with their CUDA initiative to unleash the GPU for general purpose computing. Though Intel has no comments about these developments other than why would developers budge to another platform and possibly more work to recompile their codes, the reality is that we believe there will be a light shift occurring, at least slowly and steadily. The big guns in the software world may not be the first movers, but the second or third tier software developers would surely give them a shot - after all, GP-GPU computing has in selective areas such as stream processing proven to be far more efficient than a traditional CPU. Still, there are several data types and math precision requirements that the GPU currently cannot handle, so the CPU is far from being rivaled. Here are some expectations and scenarios from John Taylor:-

"So the workloads and where it happens is going to change in the future, but we've got to work with the development community to take advantage of the new computing architectures that will have two, three, four or more general purpose serial computing capable cores sitting besides hundreds of shader cores (or GPU-GPU cores) that can have amazing floating-point performance and can perform several parallelized tasks such as transcoding and encoding.

The things that drive us crazy today, let's say you use Nero and you take a digital file, transcode it and burn it on a DVD for whatever reasons. That takes hours, especially if it's a 1GB file or larger. The promise of accelerated computing is get the plug-in done with Nero, have a high-end discrete graphics card or when Fusion is adopted, everybody will be having those GPU cores sitting on their CPU too, and what took hours will just take minutes. And those are perhaps one of the more computationally intensive tasks that consumer do today."

What Fusion Brings to the Table

HWZ: How is the AMD Fusion initiative shaping up? When can we expect to see it?

Taylor: Fusion is expected to become retail ready around late 2009. Expect some announcements to be made soon with regards to the work that AMD has been doing in this area.

HWZ: Which markets is AMD focusing their Fusion strategy in and who would benefit the most out of this realization?

Taylor: To bring about unlocking the real expected performance gains by bringing both the CPU and GPU architectures together, that would take some time since it highly depends on the extent of collaboration and breakthrough in software design tools to embrace the new GP-CPU initiatives. However, those who will benefit first would the notebook vendors and the notebook users. With the simplicity of the internal notebook hardware, we can expect further innovations on the design of thin-and-light notebooks (maybe even smaller, lighter), more battery life or other feature implementation such as perhaps integrating a much more powerful discrete graphics commonly found in much larger notebooks thanks to the space savings using the Fusion platform. Those who would benefit the most would be dependant upon how things roll out with how software adopts to the APUs. It has implications throughout the entire computing space, such as high performance computing (HPC space), data centers (some are being involved increasingly with more media intensive workloads), as well as desktop and gaming. It will have broad implications, when it takes off.

New Brand Strategies

Intel has their Centrino-class of marketing and branding to get consumers to adopt their notebooks easily and likewise the same approach is applied with their vPro branding to target OEMs and large business clients. In a similar manner, AMD has just recently launched two new marketing strategies which will hopefully make things easier; AMD Game! is targeted at the casual gaming consumers, while the AMD Business Class goes head-to-head with Intel's vPro for a slice of the OEM/business segment.

AMD Game!

Delving into more details, AMD Game! is the company's bid to classify systems that are capable of smooth HD graphics game play. This would greatly assist casual end-users and the gaming folks to help identify the capabilities of what they seek and in expectations without having to bother with all the specification details. There are two level of AMD Game! platform certifications and they are as follows:-

Platforms	Minimum Specifications	Logo Stack
AMD Game!	AMD Athlon X2 5600+ processor ATI Radeon HD 3650 graphics AMD 770 chipset
AMD Game! Ultra	AMD Phenom X4 9650 processor ATI Radeon HD 3850 graphics AMD 770 chipset

This is something that Intel cannot readily replicate on their own since they aren't able to provide an entire systems platform. AMD however does and can easily embark on such marketing. Let's hope they are able to stir things up.

AMD Business Class Strategy

Next, we'll talk about the business segment. With Intel's vPro comes not just the brand and technologies that Intel bundles with, but along comes Intel's proprietary management console and technologies. There are however two concerns of this; one is that organizations don't wish to get locked into something proprietary, while others are looking for a far more comprehensive solution. For this reason, Intel also supports open standards. This is where AMD's Business Class strategy differs, as AMD will be channeling their energy solely into the open standards initiative even though it is generally known that open standards take time to mature. AMD says that testing and evaluations are already underway. They expect by 2009 more organizations and committees will be doing this in earnest and it will be really in 2010 when one will see widespread deployment of these open standards type of manageability.

AMD's Business Class branding is designed with the business in mind to deliver the best value on the market and with these principles, systems with the AMD Business Class branding feature the following:-

• Better chipsets then the competition for business and multimedia (AMD 780V for now) - open platform to enable a choice of NVIDIA chipsets.
• Stable top-to-bottom business class CPUs that are great in multi tasking and are energy efficient.
• Supporting the open industry standard for management and security
• Windows Vista Business OS

AMD Processors appended with a "B" to the end of their designation denotes the commitment to the OEMs and solution providers to their own customers that if they buy a system with that platform/processor today, they will be able to get the same processor two years from now - most useful for large organizations expanding the user base and adopting more of the same systems/configurations so that they can be easily deployed with the same software image. Thus when an organization buys an AMD Business Class certified system today, he can be guaranteed that the exact same system, configuration, components, drivers and software will be available for up to two years when purchasing the same system again later or for support purposes.

So AMD's proposition to their Business Class systems as opposed to Intel's vPro is primarily on their more capable and balanced platform, plus the full commitment to open industry standard for management and security. Their new Puma notebook platform will also have a business class variant, but more info and design wins will be announced at a more appropriate time.

AMD's Notebook Refresh Imminent

Let's start with some current stats on the notebook end. As John fed us some data to juggle with, we found that in recent times where AMD has won a notebook design based on an AMD CPU, the chipset more often than not is powered by NVIDIA (at least 5 out of 10 of these notebooks). As mentioned earlier, AMD was late to deliver a suitably updated notebook chipset as well as discrete mobile graphics and these stats perfectly make sense.

Come Computex next week, AMD will make a big bang by launching their next generation notebook platform, Puma. As usual, this will consist of three ingredients:- The new Griffen mobile processor, an AMD M780G (RS780M) mobile chipset and 802.11a/b/g/n compliant WiFi chip from third party vendors. For those unaware, the Griffen processor, which will officially be known as the AMD Turion X2 Ultra is none other than a dual-core variant of the Phenom architecture, complete with AMD CoolCore for fine and course power management on various part of the CPU, as well as a more power-optimized HyperTransport bus and dynamic power management. The M780G mobile chipset is essentially a more power-optimized AMD 780G chipset on the desktop, supports ATI PowerXpress Technology to cycle between IGP and discrete graphics engines dynamically (without rebooting) where applicable to save on battery performance, packs up to four times the 3D processing power of the previous mobile IGP (the RS690M), and lastly the new IGP core integrates the UVD feature of the latest Radeon HD 3000 series to support Avivo HD for great Blu-ray and HD DVD playback experience.

Since the Puma platform is not far from being launched, John let us in on some of the stats on the design wins where the new Turion X2 Ultra mobile CPU is used will more often than not be based on the AMD M780G chipset - which is about 9 out of 10 notebooks design wins, so that probably covers a majority of the OEM notebook vendors, considering that AMD has about 100 design wins for the Puma platform already. This is where things could probably go south for NVIDIA's share to budge into the notebook space. You would think NVIDIA might have better luck to continue their mobile graphics segment, but we've got news that the Mobility Radeon HD 3000 series have recently started to ship to notebook vendors. With the OEMs preferring AMD's complete platform solution, this could be the case even for adopting ATI's mobile graphics parts - more so when you consider the advantage of the PowerXpress. So unless AMD/ATI slip up somewhere, it looks like NVIDIA's going to have a tough time later this year in the mobile market space.

Intel's Atom: AMD Plays Defense

You might have heard of the recent NVIDIA-VIA alliance, in that both are working together to offer a US$45 platform to combat Intel's own Celeron and Intel 945G combo. So far not many details have surfaced on this platform, but it's probably going to be targeted at very low-cost compact desktop systems (likely Nettops) and in the Netbook segment. Of course in this same segment is Intel's new Atom processors that will span the UMPC, netbook and nettop product groups as well.

Now here's where AMD doesn't exactly have a ready-made platform option to offer the industry. While it has low-cost and low-TDP processors like Semprons and the Turion processor, they are not yet low-power enough to fit these segmentations. This is where AMD's previously disclosed Bobcat platform will cater to these needs, an x86 class chip that suits devices more powerful than PDAs, but less powerful than full-fledged notebooks - which is exactly where UMPCs and netbooks position themselves. This was made known in 2007 and AMD brings to light that Bobcat that will most likely come into play in 2009. At this late juncture, it's hard not to dismiss the possibility that Bobcat might have a Fusion-like core for greater integration and power reduction.

While several of these mini notebook vendors like HP, ASUS and more are ramping up their netbook class systems, AMD begs to differ that this doesn't yet signal a strong demand for such systems. At least till early this year, many analysts too were quite divided and uncertain if this category would be in critical demand. Look at it this way - there are high-end handhelds like the Nokia Communicator series or the multimedia oriented N95 phones as well as other heavyweights like the HTC TyTN II that have great PIM functionality (including e-mail), have simple office suites and have speedy Internet connectivity. Best of all, these fit in your pocket. With products like these, the only few advantages netbooks have is their screen size, larger keyboard and better processing power for better productivity. They are however not much cheaper than full-fledged notebooks that are larger and more comfortable to use but lose out on the ultra-light and portability factor. The point John drove here is that netbooks don't solve a critical need/desire that traditional notebooks or handhelds offer at the moment. In a way, netbooks have sort of become a sought after niche segment, but not yet large enough a demand to make it a mainstream volume consideration for all vendors.

Of course we can also conversely say that AMD doesn't yet have a solution to this area (the AMD Geode family isn't powerful enough as seen from some Kohjinsha netbooks), thus AMD's current stance of this growing segment. When asked to comment on AMD's position against the Intel Atom processors, this is what John has to say at the moment:-

"They (Intel) may be able to deliver a lot of these Atom-based systems, but what is the total system experience/architecture such that Intel can compete and deliver a really rich experience such that the device/system has a chance to compete and not feel like a highly compromised device. We think this is where we have the advantage. The AMD device would always look better and deliver better performance than other competitive devices."

Probably true for the next class of options such as ultra value notebooks, but with AMD out of an immediate solution to the Netbook class of products, they might have to sit out and watch at the sidelines for sometime. By the time Bobcat arrives to compete in this space, they might have difficulty penetrating this segment as Intel's expecting (successor to the current Intel Centrino Atom or Menlow platform) to be available in 2009. At the moment, Moorestown is expected to be made up of an SoC chip (Lincroft, that integrates the 45nm Silverthorne core with graphics, video and memory controller on a single chip) along with an I/O hub (Langwell). Where AMD might have a chance to succeed is if Bobcat debuts as Platform on a Chip (PoC) solution and/or have significantly better graphics capabilities. So this will be an interesting face-off next year. For now, AMD feels that there's not enough demand to carve a solution for this segment immediately.

As for Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), which is related to Intel's Centrino Atom platform initiative, AMD's approaching this segment with a wait-and-see attitude. They clearly see room for smartphones with interesting things happening in this space (which also includes the advancements made in their own Imageon series offerings) and we have to agree that this segment is flourishing. There hasn't been any prototype or demo substantial or persuasive enough for us to consider MIDs a serious segment. It seems like yet another product that's vying for your bag/pocket space, but doesn't address any particularly clear market segment that existing smartphones, PMPs or other handheld devices already take care of.

The next segment above this is the ultra value notebooks and desktops and is one of AMD's favorite. It's very obvious when you check any retail outlets because at the low price points, you'll most often find an AMD-powered machine or the Intel's equivalent doesn't technically offer enough merit as AMD does. So for the near-term, we see AMD holding this area strong as it's able to offer solutions at low cost with reasonable performance as well (something that the Celeron series has never been as competitive in).

AMD's Proliferation on to the Big Screen

Of course we shouldn't forget that AMD acquired a very important portfolio from ATI in addition to graphics processors and that's the consumer electronics business thanks to the Imageon and Xilleon line of chipsets catering to the handheld and the digital TV segments respectively.

This greatly helped AMD grow relationships with the major C.E. players in the industry for better business prospects and infiltrate other markets (non traditional arenas) to utilize the x86 architecture. For example, future generation flat panel LCD display can integrate some x86 processing architecture which can even eliminate the need for a media extender/converter and bring in a Windows-type of experience as well as Internet capabilities directly into the HDTV. Already, , so such integration levels on the TV is certainly plausible. That's where AMD's graphics technology in a HDTV today can power the other processing demands of HDTVs and combined with the traditional compute power, the HDTV of the future holds some interesting possibilities and usage scenarios.

John went on to explain that some of AMD's graphics technology is being used today in the HD business like implementing 120Hz refresh rate to reduce motion blur and create overall better looking HD experience. And with films shot at 24FPS and being shown in HDTVs at 60 or 120Hz refresh rates, that requires smart adaptive processing to create the missing frames to create the smooth viewing experience. Their Xillion integrated digital television solutions handles all these and more and using this series, AMD is working with Sony, Samsung and many other HD television makers to integrate their technology within. These are companies that AMD has never worked with before and the C.E. business portfolio from the acquisition of ATI is really exciting times for the company.

AMD's Penetration into Handhelds

Like the digital TVs, ATI was also deeply rooted into handhelds and powering the display and graphics capabilities of the small screens we use so frequently and take for granted. They've already delivered hundreds of millions of graphics chips for the cell phones. This too AMD has handily acquired. Currently AMD's Imageon processors can be found in a number of Motorola, Samsung, LG and other handsets (head over here for the full list of phone models ). These same players however also use NVIDIA's solution as well (and you can see the list of phones using NVIDIA's GoForce over here ). AMD/ATI however does have the market lead time as they've been doing this a lot earlier than NVIDIA has.

At the moment, AMD's Imageon team is working on more complete solutions to improve their processors for next generation smartphones which may use 3D user interfaces and have the ability to play 3D games satisfyingly (smoothly). Currently the best graphics you can get out of a mobile phone is somewhere equivalent (or slightly worse than) to that of the Nintendo 64 consoles of yore. What they are trying to do is to get the Xbox 360 graphics engine into smartphones/handhelds. By doing this, they can achieve two aims - get Xbox 360 standard of graphics onto these handheld devices and make it easy to port over games designed for the Xbox 360 platform over to the handheld devices. When we asked if AMD is looking to power mobile gaming devices like the PSP or Nintendo DS Lite, they are quite open to the idea, when the opportunity strikes. Already, AMD is powering 2 of the 3 current generation gaming consoles. And since they've plans to bring Xbox 360 type of graphics power to handehelds like smartphones, and with current technology to bring that into much lower powered environments, they're confident that they are every bit as competitive to provide for mobile gaming console type devices.

In addition to this, AMD's overall focus in this segment is to boost graphics capabilities or the full application's processing capabilities to really deliver tactile useable interfaces (because devices are going to be sporting larger and larger displays which eventually will encompass both the interactive UI as well as the useable screen space) with power to perform stuff like real-time video transcoding and the likes.

As announced in Mobile World Congress 2008, they do have several upcoming solutions for these, but to get them into qualification with vendors and then to hit retail, this will take time (generally a year later), as it is the general length of time for design cycles of C.E. products. Some of the announced new Imageon family of products are as follows:-

• AMD Imageon D160 Receiver (mobile TV solution)
• AMD Imageon M210 audio processor
• AMD Imageon A250 applications processor

It looks like AMD has its upcoming series all figured out, but there seems to be new competition coming up from NVIDIA with the AXP 2500 applications processor that's also billed as the next generation platform for building smartphones for Windows Mobile devices . Not only this, NVIDIA seems to be getting into some new x86 compatible solutions with their upcoming Tegra series that's a computer-on-a-chip kind of solution that's also targeted in the same space. Of course, it will be a long time before we can actually find out if NVIDIA's new entries now have any impact due to the long C.E. design and validation cycle. Still, AMD does have the advantage of ATI's longstanding relationships with key mobile makers with a far higher penetration of their Imageon devices than NVIDIA has made progress with their existing GoForce series.

On a related note, AMD has also licensed vector graphics (via OpenVG) and 3D (via OpenGL ES) technologies to mobile chipset and silicon suppliers to deliver good image quality and performance with low power consumption. Some of the companies that AMD has sealed a deal as of late 2007 are Nokia, QUALCOMM Inc., STMicroelectronics and Freescale Semiconductor. And to fulfill their needs, AMD offers the following processors:-

• AMD Z180 OpenVG 1.x graphics core
• AMD Z460 OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics core

AMD's Forecast for the Future

So far, we've taken quite a comprehensive look at how AMD can and will push ahead to bring them up to the next level of the game and it looks promising despite the fact that the road ahead isn't going to be a smooth one and neither is the competition going to sit still. With all the areas probed into, we had one last parting question for John Taylor:-

HWZ: With the ATI-AMD merger finally settling down, Where do you see AMD heading to with its current products/technologies and of those in the pipeline?

Taylor: Ultimate Visual Experience.

AMD wants to lead with getting more people access to the Internet, affordably and with devices that makes sense for them. We want to continue to lead with energy efficient CPUs, and now we're doing it in the chipsets and on the GPUs which means everything continues to be ever more efficient while increasing the actual performance.

In terms of creating the ultimate visual experience, take for example your science fiction movies like Star Trek: The Next Generation and others. You could see this idea in the future is delivered by visual computing in which you can walk into a room and that room can instantly to your eyes seem like you've gone completely some place else and you're in a different world where it could be wildly fanciful or as normal seeming as your everyday world. We're really close now to achieving that. If you look at games like Crysis and COD 4, they are pretty realistic but they are not the same thing as how realistic some of the things being created on CPUs for over days or weeks in films today. But while we can interact with characters in COD 4, we can't interact with the creatures on film. So it all kind of goes back to what happens in programming. As we're working with companies that are starting to unlock in better ways the power of the GPU, Hollywood is starting to use the GPUs to render films on the GPU, meaning that's something to watch out and see what they come up with. On the other side, we're delivering ever more powerful GPUs without consuming enormous amounts of energy so that you can stack two, three or four of them in your system.

So we're right there at this moment where games are going to go from games that look like games to being things that look like the best digitally rendered scenes in movies, yet they are going to be interactive and you're going to be able to experience them like you're in the real world and with characters looking as real as a person in real life. So that is what's next and that's what I get excited about and you're going to hear a lot about from AMD this year about what it means for movie making and what it means for game play.

If you start to put the pieces together and start to think about things like the Nintendo Wii, the Wii actually has our graphics engine from a few generations ago, but what got people excited was actually the user interface and you've got companies out there working on user interfaces where it's just a camera watching you and responding to your movements on the avatar for whatever the gameplay is. Now let's put it all together, and imagine the gaming experience that is projected on a wall at a resolution that's very satisfying to the human eye, and doesn't make the human eye think it's really missing anything and the creatures that are there, whatever they are, look real. They don't look like video games, they look real and I can interact with it with my body movements. I mean if you're talking about a breakthrough in what gaming is, if you think it's addictive today, just think about what it's going to look like in a couple of years as the game developers figure out how to take advantage of the GPU power. So that's what we mean by ultimate visual experience. Yeah, we mean that a mainstream PC from AMD is a better visual experience than a mainstream PC from the other guy but we also mean 4 years or 6 years from now, we think we've got some big breakthroughs coming in gaming that make the demos you're seeing today seem like child's play. So that's something pretty exciting to watch from AMD.

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