AMD Reveals its 2012-2013 Roadmap, Will Focus on APUs and Less on Desktops CPUs
AMD shared its roadmap for the next two years last week on its Financial Analyst Day. Acknowledging Intel's dominance in the desktop CPU market, AMD has its sights set on the flourishing mobile segment.
Last week on AMD's Financial Analyst Day, the company revealed its roadmap for the next two years. On the discrete graphics front, we have seen the launch of its Southern Island GPUs for desktops while for mobile graphics solution, AMD made available its Radeon HD 7000M GPUs that are codenamed "London".
With annual growth figures provided by AMD, the market segments that provide growth opportunities are media tablets, graphics and embedded solutions.
Besides revealing the roadmap, the company also outlined its strategy for the future. It is hedging its bets on system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs, low-power solutions and heterogeneous computing. AMD CEO, Mr. Roy Read said that with AMD's realigned strategy, the company is poised to take advantage of an inflection point of the computing industry.
The company will leverage on its first-to-market advantage with its APUs that were first launched in 2011 and continue to expand on the ecosystem that is established by its APUs.
As AMD shifts its focus to the notebook and tablet market segments, we believe that it will also face competition from Intel and ARM. Both these companies have offerings that target this market segment. Intel's Ivy Bridge launch in April this year will intensify the competition while ARM's Cortex processors will also provide strong headwinds.
AMD Desktop Roadmap 2012-2013
With its support for heterogeneous computing, AMD will continue to blur the line between desktop and mobile computing by offering both CPUs and APUs for desktop computing solutions.
AMD is not exiting the desktop market segment, it will launch its second-geneneration 32nm FX-series processors codenamed "Vishera" with four to eight Piledriver cores.
AMD Server Roadmap 2012-2013
According to figures provided by AMD, the server market segment's growth is almost slightly less than twice that of the desktop segment. The company's roadmap shows its has processors that target main servers to low-power ones.
The Interlagos was launched last year to replace its 6-core Opteron CPUs, updating its sever CPU SKUs with Bulldozer cores. In the following year, they will be updated with Piledriver-based versions of the chips (sharing the same sockets), codenamed "Abu Dhabi," "Seoul" and "Delhi."
Discrete Graphics and APUs 2012-2013
The APUs from AMD will only make their transition to the 28nm fabrication process next year whilst the company is already shipping its 28nm Southern Island GPUs since the start of the year.
The Southern Islands will be updated with the Sea Islands GPUs that will feature enhancements to the Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA) for better performance at computing tasks.
By 2013, with the exception of the server CPUs, the rest of the offerings from AMD will migrate to the 28nm fabrication process. One of the touted advantages of the new fabrication process is its higher yield rates that translate to lower production costs. This will definitely help AMD to see through its renewed strategies for targeting the flourishing markets segments of mobile computing.
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