[Deustche Bank Conference] AMD's New x86 Core is Zen, WIll Launch WIth K12

[EmmaLong]

So let me start by saying that I read this on WCCF. They're the only site to break the news and their source does check out (checked it out my self).
http://wccftech.com/breaking-amds-gen-x86-high-performance-core-code-named-zen-debut-k12

The new x86 core to follow the bulldozer family is called Zen and it's coming with K12 in early 2016 according to AMD's CEO Rory.
We don't know much about the design other than it's a brand new clean sheet of paper "from scratch" microarchitecture developed by Jim Keller.

Rory Read at the Deustche Bank 2014 Technology Conference :

Everyone knows that Bulldozer was not the game changing part when it was introduced three years ago. We have to live with that for four years but Zen, K12 we went out and got Jim Keller we went out and got Raja Koduri from Apple, Mark Papermaster, Lisa sue. We are building now our next generation graphics and compute technology that customers are very interested in and they’ll ( referring to the next generation graphics and compute architecture) move to the next generation node and they’ll be ready to go.

 

[monstercameron]

cant bring myself to care. 2016 is so far away.

 

[Phynaz]

I have the distinct feeling the op will never be back.

 

[meloz]

I have the distinct feeling the op will never be back.

Yes, just a blatant way to get some traffic to his website wccwhatever.

 

[SlowSpyder]

I have the distinct feeling the op will never be back.

Me as well. But, at least the OP made sure the source checked out.

 

[EmmaLong]

Not a fan of wccf like many of you. I'm a linustechtips forum member, just thought I'd share.
No sinister conspiracy folks.

 

[Phynaz]

We'll in that case welcome to the forums.

 

[mrmt]

The new x86 core to follow the bulldozer family is called Zen and it's coming with K12 in early 2016 according to AMD's CEO Rory.
We don't know much about the design other than it's a brand new clean sheet of paper "from scratch" microarchitecture developed by Jim Keller.

Rory Read at the Deustche Bank 2014 Technology Conference :

Here's the transcript just in case anyone wants to have a look:

http://seekingalpha.com/article/248...-technology-conference-transcript?part=single


That was a fair speech IMO. First it seems that they do not have a clear strategy beyond developing the ARM server business and developing embedded products (semi-custom), the rest is pretty confuse. Rory talks about developing the professional graphics cards, but fails to address the elephant in the room (AMD poor software support). Rory talks about opportunities on the commercial channel, but fails to address the bigger elephant in that room (Intel manufacturing lead and scale). And they don't know what to do yet with their ARM cores beyond servers (Lisa Su will take care of this).

That's not bad per se. They seem to have spent *a lot* of energy in stabilizing the company, and they accomplished just that in the last three years, but I was expecting a little more in terms of strategy and direction.

 

[SlowSpyder]

Not a fan of wccf like many of you. I'm a linustechtips forum member, just thought I'd share.
No sinister conspiracy folks.

We tend to get a lot of drive byes around here... apologies if you're not one of them.


Anyway, I wasn't sure if AMD had plans beyond Excavator, I guess around IDF would be the time to at least try and grab a little attention. I doubt Jim Keller can have the same success, but the bar wasn't set overly high with Bulldozer. I'll wait for more details, hopefully they have something up their sleeve.

 

[EmmaLong]

We tend to get a lot of drive byes around here... apologies if you're not one of them.


Anyway, I wasn't sure if AMD had plans beyond Excavator, I guess around IDF would be the time to at least try and grab a little attention. I doubt Jim Keller can have the same success, but the bar wasn't set overly high with Bulldozer. I'll wait for more details, hopefully they have something up their sleeve.

Going back to 6 year old Phenom with updated ISA is frankly better than faildozer. The bar is indeed very low so AMD can pretend to over deliver this time around.

 

[mrmt]

Going back to 6 year old Phenom with updated ISA is frankly better than faildozer. The bar is indeed very low so AMD can pretend to over deliver this time around.

The bar for AMD is, the bar for the market is not. AMD has been consistently losing share because their products don't improve anymore, so their value is being eroded every time intel launches a new product. They must improve relatively to Intel, not to their own products, otherwise they will keep losing share, the only benefit wil be a slower rate of decrease.

 

[jhu]

Not a fan of wccf like many of you. I'm a linustechtips forum member, just thought I'd share.
No sinister conspiracy folks.

Well, where's the fun in that?

 

[Leyawiin]

cant bring myself to care. 2016 is so far away.

Yeah, Jesus could come back by then.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Cool. Should be fun to see what it can do.

 

[Rickyyy369]

Im looking forward to it. I think they probably learned a couple of lessons on how not to make a CPU throughout Bulldozer's lineage. It couldn't possibly be worse.. could it?

 

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

The bar for AMD is, the bar for the market is not. AMD has been consistently losing share because their products don't improve anymore, so their value is being eroded every time intel launches a new product. They must improve relatively to Intel, not to their own products, otherwise they will keep losing share, the only benefit wil be a slower rate of decrease.

Losing Share? LOL -- I guess you haven't noticed that AMD's market share increased from 14.3% to 16.9% this year.

Their APU's have been very attractive to OEM's -- and the Xbox One and PS4 wins didn't exactly hurt, either. Granted... They have badly neglected AM3, but even that socket got new (albeit rebinned) products recently. They do have new products coming before 2016, it just won't be all new CPU architectures. I really wish they'd dump GloFo though -- I think Steamroller would be pretty compelling at 22 nanometer.

 

[Abwx]

They have badly neglected AM3

There was really a lack of wisdom from AMD on this matter, i guess that given the initial BD launch they thought that wouldnt get huge sales even with Piledriver being notably better, they were wrong since this is the FX line that helped them sustain a few profitables products, even a cheap chipset with minimal recent functionalities like 4 USB 3/8 USB2/4 SATA III would have been welcomed, more I/O could had been provided by additional controlers, in the process they would had got rid of the current combo whose TDP is 20-26W, wich increase to 32W at the main level given the losses, this power has often been attributed to the FX while actualy all tests show that it s within its rated TDP.

 

[Phynaz]

Losing Share? LOL -- I guess you haven't noticed that AMD's market share increased from 14.3% to 16.9% this year.

AMD x86 chips bought by Microsoft and Sony for use in their hot-selling game consoles accounted for 4 percent of AMD’s market share, McCarron said.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2148620/game-consoles-spur-amds-x86-processor-market-share.html

Pull out the consoles and AMD is losing PC market share.

 

[AtenRa]

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2148620/game-consoles-spur-amds-x86-processor-market-share.html

Pull out the consoles and AMD is losing PC market share.

NVIDIA also loosing GPU market share but thats not a problem for them.

Loosing market share doesnt mean you move lower volume than before.

Or, increasing market share doesnt always translates in to higher profit(Intel Tablets)

 

[sontin]

nVidia didn't lose market share. Y-Y was the exact same for both companies.
However, they made more money than last year while AMD made less.

 

[Arachnotronic]

nVidia didn't lose market share. Y-Y was the exact same for both companies.
However, they made more money than last year while AMD made less.

NVIDIA's focus seems to be on sewing up the high-margin portions of the dGPU market (professional, HPC, GRID, etc.)

AMD has expressed a desire to grow its share here, but it'll be interesting to see how that battle ultimately unfolds. Both AMD and NVIDIA make good hardware, but it is my understanding that NVIDIA's software/drivers -- particularly in professional spaces -- are leaps and bounds ahead of AMD's.

 

[TurtleCrusher]

NVIDIA's focus seems to be on sewing up the high-margin portions of the dGPU market (professional, HPC, GRID, etc.)

AMD has expressed a desire to grow its share here, but it'll be interesting to see how that battle ultimately unfolds. Both AMD and NVIDIA make good hardware, but it is my understanding that NVIDIA's software/drivers -- particularly in professional spaces -- are leaps and bounds ahead of AMD's.

Keep drinking that decade old Kool-Aid. At the very least AMD didn't release drivers that killed off cards. That fiasco ensured I never ran less than a month old nVidia drivers on my systems.

 

[mrmt]

Keep drinking that decade old Kool-Aid. At the very least AMD didn't release drivers that killed off cards. That fiasco ensured I never ran less than a month old nVidia drivers on my systems.

I don't think there's any real issue with AMD consumer drivers, but AMD professional drivers and devrel are really subpar compared to Nvidia. Take for example GPGPU tools: While AMD cannot talk enough of its HSA vapourware, Nvidia has been consistently delivering with CUDA.

 

[mrmt]

Losing Share? LOL -- I guess you haven't noticed that AMD's market share increased from 14.3% to 16.9% this year.

That's the overall share of the graphics cards market, not discrete GPU share, and it says nothing about revenue share or about the market brackets where AMD is building this share. This is a number you have to take care when dealing with it.

For example, let's say that AMD didn't lose any share, but it sold more chips with iGPU and those replaced sales of chips without iGPU that shipped with MB without iGPUs. That could lead to a market share gain for AMD despite not necessarily being revenue positive for them. It could even be revenue negative, for example, if AMD sells more iGPU chips and less professional GPU cards, they would gain share over Nvidia (and maybe Intel) but Nvidia would be laughing all the way to the bank with their smaller but far more profitable market share.

 

[lefty2]

I found this quote quite funny:

You mentioned, about tablets and mentioned about them slowing already. What's AMD’s strategy for addressing that market? One of your big competitors is addressing it but kind of wrapping $20 bills around every one of their processors.