Free from legal woes, AMD heads for market leadership | Bangkok Post: tech

AMD is headed for profit, headed for the number one spot in graphics, headed for greater variety in the thin and light segment and, soon, headed for extreme performance increases and new form factors as its Fusion-converged CPU-GPU architecture rolls out. It is also finally free from the shackles of its long-running lawsuit with Intel and relishing competing in a free and fair market.

Howie Lau, General Manager of Lenovo Asean, with the new AMD-powered x100e aimed at the lucrative thin and light sector.

Tomo Kamiya, Regional Vice-President for Asia South, reflected on 2009 as the year that AMD will finally make a profit. It transitioned its entire CPU lineup to a 45-nanometre process and is on course for 32 nanometres in 2011. It also entered the ultra-thin notebook category at a price and power point that came in above the "extreme low-end that the competition had introduced", and the expensive business oriented thin and light notebooks.

On the graphics side, ATI, now fully integrated into the AMD family, began the year with cards that supported Windows 7's new DirectX 11 standard and ended the year rounding off its lineup with mainstream and entry-level chips to provide the consumer with DirectX 11 at every price point.

"We hope to take lead in graphics by the end of 2010," he said.

On the server side, the six-core Opteron, code-named "Istanbul" was successfully launched. AMD supplies chips to four out of the top five supercomputer manufacturers in the world as of the end of 2009.

Perhaps most importantly, 2009 saw free and fair competition after the settlement of the lawsuit with Intel. While some governments' anti-trust lawsuits with Intel continue, from AMD's point of view, that is now in the past and the company looks forward to competing in a fair and open market.

Finally, Kamiya noted that AMD was also achieving a lot of success away from the PC market with gaming consoles.

For Southeast Asia, Kamiya said that the focus will very much be on the consumer market, with a full range of laptops, and the gaming market, focusing on connecting those in low-penetration markets and investing in human resources to provide advice at the point of sales. He admitted that AMD simply does not have the cash to wage a huge marketing campaign like the competition.

In 2011, AMD will move to a 32-nanometre process and is on course to launch its Fusion architecture where CPU and GPU are fabricated on the same piece of silicon, an architectural shift which will result in extreme performance increases.

Tan See Ghee, Marketing Director for AMD South Asia mapped out AMD's platform line-up which heavily features DirectX 11, 6 to 8 core systems and an emphasis on graphics.

"Stop talking about processors, start talking about usage," is the motto behind Vision. Vision See is the entry-level platform, Vision Share is the mid range and Vision Create is at the high end. The names refer to the tasks that each platform is suited to - seeing, sharing and creation.

The idea is that rather than buying a particular chipset or processor, people can decide on a laptop or PC, depending on what they will do with it.

Vision Pro is the name for enterprise-class notebooks. Asked if it was more or less like Intel's Vpro 2, Tan said that it was more than Vpro in that it was designed around open standards and the system works with legacy devices that did not have out-of-band management via a software daemon. It also includes a TPM (trusted platform module) chip that encrypts the hard disk so that data cannot be extracted if the drive is stolen or the password compromised.

For notebooks, AMD will fill its lineup and introduce its Tigris II platform with up to 7 hours of resting battery life, triple and quad core CPUs, all in a thermal envelope of 25 watts - cool enough to fit into the compact form factor notebook form-factor that is increasingly becoming popular.

Tomo Kamiya, Regional VP for AMD.

AMD's 2010 ultra-thin platform (code-named Nile) features 11 percent more performance and 7.5 hours of resting battery life.

While most of the platforms were evolutionary going into 2011, one platform, stood out as being radical. Brazos will be optimised for "new form factors".

All the executives were tight-lipped as to what it meant exactly, only that Fusion would mean a new performance/power/thermal point that would leverage powerful graphics to allow Brazos system builders to give rise to radically different and smaller designs beyond the tablets and slates that we see today.

What AMD will not be doing is engaging in the new segment right at the very bottom that the competition has created (the Netbook).

On Graphics, ATI just rolled out two new cards at the entry level and mainstream level, making it the only vendor to offer DirectX 11 support in Windows 7 for better performance and detail at every price point.

ATI Stream is the term used for its architecture, which allows the GPU to do a lot of work that used to be done by the CPU, allowing games to boast everything from more realistic water and cloth to more intelligent "hardware-instanced" crowds and in-game physics.

Cinematic Gaming, the idea of using GPUs for movie-like rendering in real-time, is now part of ATI Stream architecture where the GPU is used to offload work normally associated with the CPU. It is now commercially available in a package called Studio GPU.

ATI is already the leader in mobile discrete graphics and a DirectX 11 Mobility Radeon 5000 chipset will make its way into notebooks with CPUs from both camps this year.

On the software side, ATI is working with the industry to help develop both OpenCL and DirectComputer developer tools to enable programmers to create ever-more realistic games.

At the high end, Tan expects to see 1,920-line monitors become very affordable this year, with enthusiasts going for monitors with vertical resolutions of up to 2,560 lines. The 4,000-line professional monitors will still be beyond the reach of many. Becoming more common will be multi-monitor setups and he expects enthusiasts to be putting up three or four 1,920 line monitors in an array, which ATI is supporting at full resolution.

ATI has done work on the drivers to optimise multi-monitor placement. The first fruits of the co-operation have been a line of monitors with Samsung that feature a thin bezel. The driver recognises these monitors, their placement and the exact width of the bezel. For a two-by-two layout, instead of a break between the monitors, it adds virtual pixels to the desktop and "hides" them behind the bezel so the effect is more like looking through a window with a tape over it. For side by side with the monitors around the viewer, the drivers add optical 3D correction depending on the angle for a cave-like experience.

In the server space, the Opteron line-up will be simplified with the 6000-series, aimed at high performance computing and databases, and the 4000-series, which features low-power for the boom in cloud-computing infrastructure. The 6000 series will feature systems with 8 to 12 cores in two to four sockets and with four memory channels per chip so that the extra cores are not starved of data.

Later, Kamiya said that the spirit of AMD's 50 by 15 vision, in which AMD set a goal to lead the industry in connecting 50 percent of the world's population to the Internet by 2015, was still very much alive, though the name itself had not been mentioned as of late.

Asked about why the promise of backward and forward compatibility had been broken in some cases in the transition from AM2+ to AM3, Tan explained that while the specifications provided by AMD were clear, the way motherboard vendors implemented it meant that many were not delivering sufficient power to feed the top-end AM3 chips.

In many cases, BIOS incompatibility could be solved via a workaround. It is possible to update the motherboard BIOS with a new AM3-compatible BIOS first but in order to do so, an AM2+ chip would have to be on the motherboard during the flashing process.

Relate Search: Tomo Kamiya, Regional Vice-President for Asia South, Howie Lau, General Manager of Lenovo Asean, AMD-powered x100e