SAN FRANCISCO – At a press event on Friday, Advanced Micro Devices provided a comprehensive overview of its new branding strategy for "Phenom," the company's forthcoming enthusiast-level, quad-core desktop CPU family based on its "Barcelona" technology.
The company also used Friday's event to officially launch its previously delayed Radeon HD 2000 (formerly known as the R600) series of GPUs.
According to AMD, the new DirectX 10 ATI Radeon HD 2000 family will begin shipping today and consist of 10 products, from the ultra high-end Radeon HD 2900 XT (available Monday) on down to middle and lower-end versions of the graphics card, which the company says will be released in early June. Available immediately, the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT is expected to be priced at $399, in a bundle that will include Team Fortress 2, Portal, and Half-Life 2: Episode Two from Valve Software.
As AMD had previously stated in March, the release date for the Radeon HD 2000 series, while never firm, was pushed back so that the company could debut a "more comprehensive" set of new GPU products simultaneously—as opposed to just one high-end version.
In the coming weeks, AMD said it will be making good on that promise.
AMD's 'True' Quad-Core Family: The Phenom
As far as the revamped processor line-up is concerned, the Sunnyvale-based company announced it will be adding a new high-end processor family, dubbed Phenom, to its desktop processor lineup in the second half of the year—one that AMD is describing as a "true" quad-core solution.
When asked what 'true' meant—and if this labeling somehow implied that its competitor was pushing 'false' quad-core on the public—AMD representatives said the qualifier was really used to denote multiple features, such an integrated DDR2 memory controller, a shared L3 cache, the company's HyperTransport technology links, 128-bit floating point units, and Socket AM2 and Socket AM2+ infrastructure compatibility for a seamless upgrade path—all of which AMD hopes will grab that attention of enthusiast PC users.
"Phenom is going to be using some new core technologies, said Leslie Sobol, AMD's director of product and brand management for it desktops, referring what she called the architecture's "seamless integration of its memory controller."
"It's quad-core on the same die," she continued. "There's some real advantages to that versus two that are kind of stuck together in a socket. One, you don't have any memory latency—no bandwidth or I/O issues. With dual cores on die, and our integrated memory controller, it's seamless integration…Unlike our competitor, where even with shared cache, you've got to go through the front side bus to communicate, so it ends up being the bottleneck no matter how much cache you put on both sides."
And while the new Phenom processors will have the shared L3 cache and the 128-bit floating point units, they will also be a available in enhanced platforms as well, AMD said, one of which is codenamed "Wahoo".
Wahoo is to be one of three future motherboard designs the company says and will have two sockets to allow for up to an 8-core system.
"When we use that term, true, what we mean is that you have real access," Stephen DiFranco, corporate vice president of sales and marketing for AMD, added. "Our architecture has been designed from the beginning to give systems complete access to all four cores all the time. I like to say there's four doors and four cores."
"Our competitor has chosen an architecture that basically puts a turnstile in front of their four cores and forces a queuing system of data to come in and out through that turnstile," DiFranco continued. "So when we say, true, that's what we mean. They're [the cores] native, they're real, [and] all four of them sit on the silicon…"
This, opposed to what AMD refers to as the "packaged approach" that its rival Intel uses, which AMD claims consists of a legacy x86 architecture, or: "a 20-year old front-side bus architecture where CPUs, memory, and I/O all share a bus, and which can bottleneck and reduce quad-core performance," diFranco said.
So how does AMD expect these differences in processor architecture will play in the consumer market? For one, the company says that it will give enthusiasts (or "megataskers," as the company is fond of referring to them as) much more cutting-edge performance. The high-end Phenom FX processors will come in both quad-core and octa-core flavors with a dual-socket direct connect architecture (DSDC).
DiFranco added that end users will notice real-time rendering happening much more fluidly and will also see improved access to their data.
"If you're a gamer and are running multiple versions of a game simultaneously, your displays will be able to do that more easily," he said, giving one example.
Unfortunately, the company still would not release benchmarks, price points, or any performance-related numbers at the event with regard to Phenom or its next generation architecture.
The only thing AMD did divulge was that, because Phenom uses 65-nm technology, users should see TDPs (thermal design power) that are "relative to the current set in the market." Price points will remain competitive as well, according to AMD.
"You can expect similar power envelopes between the two dual-cores (Athlon and Phenom), as well as quad-core scales," said Sobol. "There will be no surprises in terms of power.
The New Branding, Explained
With the Phenom family release later in the year, there will also be a number of changes to AMD's desktop processor lineup, Sobol said. "Right now, we have two brands of single-core, both in Sempron and Athlon. And then we have a dual-core in Athlon and an Athlon FX," she explained.
"This is really going to change as quad-core comes in and the impact it's going to have both on the dual core perspective, as well as a single core…from a brand point of view. So where AMD currently has Sempron, Athlon, Athlon X2, and Athlon FX, it will now have Sempron, Athlon, and Phenom, Sobol explained, with Phenom essentially taking over the quad-core as well as the high-end dual-core space.
In other words, the current processor lineup will evolve from Sempron, Athlon, Athlon X2, and Athlon FX into: Sempron, Athlon X2, Phenom X2 and X4, and Phenom FX in the second half of the year.
"This is really about giving a better and more richer experience for the high-end consumer," Sobol said, referring to the quad-core introduction. "It's really about the enthusiasts. They're the ones that always lead. They want to push everything to its limit. So it's that slice of the market that's really interested in the quad core.
After all is said and done, AMD will still have a single-core brand in Sempron that will stay value-oriented and compete with Celeron, according to the company. But the Athlon X2 will evolve into what the company refers to as its "fighter brand," a dual-core brand that will compete with Intel's own Core 2 Duo.
As AMD executives explained it, there will also be open price points for the low-end portion of the dual-core market. Additionally, there will be an opportunity to upsell OEMs into the Phenom X2, which will contain the shared L3 cache and the improved instructions per clock capability.
Eventually, the IPC improvements will flow down the product line (excluding the shared L3 cache) into its Athlon and Sempron brands, AMD executives confirmed. Additionally, when Phenom is eventually released, Sobol said it will come in both single- and dual-socket solutions.
"It's a lot of choice for a small part of the market," Sobol admitted, "but it's just such an important and influential part, and we learn so much by talking to them that it's kind of like, yeah, why can't we do that. It's not that hard."
But it's not just enthusiasts AMD is looking to win the hearts and minds of with these processor family changes. The company is also undoubtedly considering its OEM partners here as well as it integrates quad-core processors into its lineup.
"From an OEM sorting perspective, it gives them a couple of different choices," Sobol explained. "They could go single (-core), dual, quad; they could go single, two dual, and have the high-end dual [the Phenom X2] ; or they could go dual, dual, quad. So it gives them a "good/better/best" [approach] as they try to sell through."
Similar flexibility for OEMs will come with AMD's forthcoming dual-socket, eight-core platform as well.
According to Sobol, OEMs will have the ability to sell it with one socket populated, allowing the consumer to buy a separate processor when they are ready.
"So it's almost three different solutions, if you will, depending on who wants to offer what," Sobol said. "Infrastructure, low cost of entry, or they can offer it all souped up and ready to go with both sockets populated," she said.
"FASN8": An Octa-core Monster for Enthusiasts continued..........................
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2129289,00.asp
