AMD on a High-Tech gamble over ATI

The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Mon, 10/02/2006 9:46 AM | Life

Arnawa Widagda, Contributor, Jakarta

The face of technology is constantly changing, this is as true today as it was when Moore's Law was first introduced. Users and developers alike are just getting accustomed to the using and developing software for dual core processors this year.

It is a decision that was forced upon them, since neither AMD nor Intel are able to push the speed limit of their processors beyond the laws of physics.

By the end of this year, we will see the first quad core processors from Intel, still based on Core 2. The Core 2 Quadro will be similar to Intel's dual core Pentium 4 D -- the four core inside the Core 2 Quadro are actually two Core 2 Duo processors squeezed together into a single die.

In contrast, we won't see quad core processors from AMD until next year's second quarter. AMD is claiming their solution is a ""true"" quad core design.

The details are sketchy and speculative at best, but what is certain is that these new quad processors will boast new architectural improvements similar to Core 2 -- better performance per watt.

One AMD spokesperson was even quoted as saying that these new processors will offer ""a 50 percent improvement"" on the current design.

Well on the way is AMD's 4x4 initiative -- the reintroduction of an affordable, multiprocessing platform outside the workstation/server segments.

The industry has not seen such a platform since Pentium II/III. 4x4 is a platform of two AM2 processor sockets in one motherboard for their mainstream desktop processors, the Athlon FX and Athlon X2 64. 4x4 motherboards will also support dual PCI-E x16 graphics cards.

It's pretty certain this means it will support ATI's Crossfire technology and quite possibly, NVIDIA's SLI. AMD have assured that 4x4 motherboards will be quad-core ready, at least initially.

While these technologies are new, they've already been in place for several years. The biggest gamble is much grander and is closely tied to AMD's recent acquisition of ATI.

Torrenza is a bold initiative from the Austin, Texas-based semiconductor company. In a Torrenza platform, AMD and other third party manufacturers will be able to use processor sockets for specialized processors like stream processing or heavy floating point calculations.

The most likely suspect of first adoption will be graphics processors. In recent years, graphics processors have progressed so rapidly that they now closely resemble processors like the Pentium and Athlon processors.

With Gelato and Sorbetto, NVIDIA have dabbled with the use of their graphics processing units as a hardware accelerated rendering solution for popular 3D digital content creation software like Maya and 3D Studio Max.

Both ATI and NVIDIA have touted support for Havok's hardware accelerated physics. Havok physics software is used both in games and digital effects for Hollywood movies.

At the last SIGGRAPH exhibition, ATI announced the release of development software that enables programmers to directly access the power of the graphics cards for stream processing tasks. One interesting demo enabled realtime sound processing usually done on professional, high-end audio equipment.

The first acknowledgment of the feasibility of such a solution came from NVIDIA's CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. In an interview several months before the announcement, or even rumors regarding AMD's acquisition of ATI, he mentioned the possibility of a processor socket ""entirely devoted to graphics"".

By integrating a graphics chip into Torrenza and supplying an affordable, consumer multiprocessing platform introduced by the 4x4 initiative, AMD will likely be able to address many markets at once -- from multi-threaded environments like servers or high performance computing for scientific simulations and research, to the home brew multimedia video/audio machine like home theater PCs, TiVo machines and of course gaming desktops/notebooks.

They will also be much cheaper to design and produce. The proof is in the brief AMD and ATI released at the announcement of ATI's acquisition.

The prospects of a network of specialized processors in a single machine is not new. Sun Microsystems' heavily multi-threaded Niagara series of processors and the combined efforts of Sony, Toshiba and IBM with the ""Cell"" used in Sony's upcoming Playstation 3 are earlier examples of such endeavors.

However, these are all closed and proprietary systems, Torrenza will be a system open to third-party manufacturers and will likely be more in widespread use and address several markets at once.

The stakes are high and AMD has to up the ante for semiconductor manufacturers everywhere. Even Intel is silently agreeing with AMD's strategic decision and currently is hard at work looking for graphics chip developers and designers.

Always the underdog, AMD has to plan its moves more aggressively than Intel. They have been quite successful in the past with the Athlon and Athlon 64. Time will tell if AMD's gambit proves to be smart play this time around.

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