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AMD: The Road Ahead
Company says 45nm process is ahead of scheduleCompany says 45nm process is ahead of scheduleCompany says 45nm process is ahead of schedule
It’s been a long two years for AMD. Aft er a ton of
trash-talking, its Phenom CPUs failed to impress any-
one. The integrated memory controller, the chip-to-
chip interconnects, and the native quad-core design
all added up to a high-end CPU that was maybe on
par with Intel’s slowest quad-core chip. It didn’t help
that an esoteric bug plagued Phenom’s launch and
left lingering doubts about the CPU.
Next year will be diff erent, the company pledges.
AMD has long acknowledged that one of its
mistakes was trying to make a native quad-core
design using a 65nm process. The chips proved to
be too big and the yields too low. The yields were
initially poor enough that the company began
taking defective quad-core dies and selling them
as tri cores.
With that in mind, AMD has been feverishly
working to get its 45nm process online. The good
news is that it’s ahead of schedule. AMD says it
expects to have 45nm-based CPUs by the end of
this year, not well into next year as expected. All
indications are that AMD will release 45nm-based
Phenoms by late this year with clock speeds
fi nally ramping up to the 3GHz range—a speed
Intel pierced more than a year ago.
The bad news is that even a 3GHz die-
shrunk Phenom may not be enough to go head-
to-head with Intel’s Core i7 in performance. For
that, it’ll likely take the company’s Shanghai
core, which is on tap for 2009. AMD is playing it much closer to the vest, but the quad-core Shanghai
will be followed by a six-core Istanbul CPU at the end of next year. By 2010, AMD expects to have
its Magny-Cours chip out with 12 cores in the CPU. Right now, AMD is mainly concentrating on
the one bright spot on its roadmap: multi-CPU systems, where its chip-to-chip design makes these
configs competitive with Intel’s CPUs.
One thing is clear, with rumors continuing to swirl that AMD is short on cash and may sell off its fabs,
the company—which has already seen its fair share of adversity—is facing one of its most trying times.about shedding one channel of DDR3 though; LGA1066-based CPUs will also bring direct-attach PCI
Express to the table.
Instead of PCI Express running through the chipset, as it does with existing Core 2 and the new per-
formance Core i7, PCI-E will reside on the die of LGA1066 CPUs. With the PCI-E in the CPU itself, Intel will
reuse its fairly slow DMI interface to connect the CPU to a single-chip south bridge. The two chips Intel will
introduce are the quad-core Lynnfi eld and the dual-core Havendale. Havendale CPUs will actually feature
a newly designed graphics core inside the heat spreader that will talk to the CPU core via a high-speed QPI
interface. Both chips will feature Hyper-Threading on all cores.
Many AMD users got a royal screwing when the company abandoned both Socket 940 and Socket 754
for a unifi ed Socket 939; could Intel do something similar? We asked Intel point blank whether LGA
would eventually be abandoned for LGA1066; the company told us it fully intends to support both platforms.Technology Watch List