AFDS (AMD Fusion Developer Summit) is now over and besides announcing the HSA Foundation together with among others ARM, the plans for 2013 have been discussed. The focus is on energy efficiency and mobility, while details on future server processors still remain a mystery.
AMD CTO Mark Papermaster rounded off AFDS with updated roadmaps for the company. Not surprisingly APUs occupied the main slides with Trinity’s successor Kaveri, and two energy efficient alternatives that will replace the platform Brazos 2.0 next year.
Kaveri will sport the third generation Bulldozer architecture dubbed Steamroller and four cores, or two modules if you will. Steamroller will be the first major revision of the architecture where we can expect larger performance improvements than Piledriver, which was introduced with Trinity. Besides that Kaveri comes with the latest graphics architecture GCN and gets up to eight GCN units for a total of 512 Radeon cores. For notebooks Kaveri will gets a TDP at 35W, while the energy efficient alternative will be rated 15W for ultrathin computers.
Kabini will replace Zacate in the Brazos 2.0 platform and sport four processor cores. The processor is based on the second generation Bobcat architecture called Jaguar and also here the details are few. Besides that we find a new graphics processor that is also based on GCN and will get a TDP of 9W to 25W. Kabini is also expected to get an integrated southbridge, which means that AMD for the first time will have an entire platform on a single chip. The focus for Kabini will be the cheaper notebook segment, much like Brazos 2.0.
Temash will most likely build on Kabini since it will get “up to four” processor cores and new GCN graphics. It will consume less power though at only 3.6W to 5.9W for fitting inside the most efficient and thinnest formfactors, e.g. tablets.
Interestingly AMD writes “up to four” cores with Temash, while it concretely says four for Kabini and Kaveri. Det här kan innebära att även de strömsnålaste varianterna kommer få fyra kärnor. Vi reserverar oss för att det kan vara tryckfel – det skulle inte vara första gången det hittar in i presentationsbilder. Samtliga APU:er som nämns kommer byggas på någon form av 28 nanometerteknik. Kabini och Temash kommer med stor sannolikhet att tillverkas av TSMC, medan en het kandidat för Kaveri är GlobalFoundries 28 nanometer HPP-teknik (High Performance Plus).
Last we have server processors were we can’t find any real news. AMD is planning to launch Abu Dhabi, Seoul and Delhi later this year, which all use the latest Piledriver architecture. It is still up to 16 core that is the market, although with higher clock frequencies than before and on average 6 percent faster IPC thanks to optimizations in the architecture. After that a new platform will come with sockets AM3+, C32 and G34, but these won’t appear until 2014 we would think.
Mark Papermaster also said that AMD will be more flexible and faster to market with new solutions. One part of this is to be flexible on the ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) that is used in the circuits. Considering the new venture with ARM and HSA Foundation it is not unlikely that we will see future APUs from AMD, with its own graphics architecture, but processor cores from ARM. Source: TechReport
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