AMD has been bucking convention from the very first, and AMD’s latest Technology Forum proves that they are intending to continue the trend, not the least because it gives them an edge over their bigger competitor. Yes, you heard right – besides their admittedly tumultuous performance in 2007 and early 2008, AMD has every intention to settle down and start regaining lost ground and regaining a competitive edge with what they term as their leadership agenda.

Hard as it may be to believe, what with all the negative press and serious missteps on AMD’s part, the company still has every intention not only to remain competitive, but to become leaders in the field. To do this, AMD believes that a re-definition of the battleground is in order, at least in the minds of most consumers. Like how AMD went whole-hog on the concept of maximum megahertz not being the end-all, be-all solution to computing power back in the Athlon XP days, they are bringing in a bevy of plans and are currently laying the foundation for these future developments based on current trends in the global, technological, industry and consumer fields and their interpretation of where technology should be headed to meet and satisfy these trends’ demands for technological sophistication in CPUs, GPUs, chipsets, and whole platforms. HWZ now brings you the coverage of the recently concluded technology forum held at the Meritus Meridien in Singapore.

                                             John Taylor, Director for Product & Strategic Communications
 

Before anything else, this entry is going to cover some of the most exciting news to come out of the AMD camp in recent months: namely that of the eventual successor of the not-yet-released Puma laptop platform. As a quick background, the Puma platform consists of a Turion X2 Ultra mobile processor codenamed Griffin, combined with ATI Radeon Mobility graphics, and tied together with an AMD 7 series chipset – the 780M. Along with excellent 3^rd-party support for the WiFi component plus a number of power and graphics innovations, these make up the second platform to be released after the enthusiast-focused Spider platform. Puma is also part of AMD’s Business Class initiative, a topic that will be covered in later entries in this blog.

Now, while the Puma platform by itself makes for very interesting reading, it cannot compare to what’s coming next – its successor, slated for a 2^nd half of 2009 release. The Shrike platform utilizing the Swift codenamed CPU – or rather, an accelerated Processing Core instead of a processor, for the simple reason that this chip consists of both a CPU and a GPU on the same piece of silicon. Details are sketchy at the moment – this factoid slipped out during the forum and was confirmed in a one-on-one interview with Mr. John Taylor, Director of Product & Strategic Communications, but the single confirmed fact of it being an integrated solution is enough to get this editor all a-flutter.

What this means in the notebook and the thin-&-light space is a more compact, more energy-efficient, cheaper and basically a more common sense approach to the trends and capabilities that I touched upon in the first paragraph. In other words, AMD’s unique position as a complete solutions company is applied in the best possible way to the surfacing trends of our industry, especially evident in the global “green” movement, the platform versus clock speed argument and accelerated computing through the GPU technological trends, which is of course itself the result of the industry trend of consolidation. In keeping with AMD’s constant need and desire to buck the trend, so to speak, thee platform solutions offer what AMD likes to call a balanced design – instead of touting a uber-powerful processor and lumping it together with the other, seemingly throw-away specifications of a computer package, AMD chose to emphasize how they have made these components into a balanced whole in the desire to provide the consumer with a very stable and very targeted set of components.

The Puma (itself a feature rich platform featuring hybrid graphics and Direct X 10 technology) and the Shrike platforms are the best example of AMD’s balanced platform initiative, but the same can also be seen in desktops and the relevant component technologies. ATI of course is the only graphics company using the 55nm process in their GPUs, meaning better efficiency, and lower power requirements. AMD’s Phenom X3 gives the consumer a viable middle choice at a price that should and will remain competitive with the competitor’s – while admittedly this is also a measure to conserve silicon yields from their production of the true quad core Phenoms, this move was also made in the interest of giving a better alternative to both the dual and quad cores available, in the power and the efficiency departments, respectively. The company as a whole is now pressing their advantage as a leader in providing a complete and balanced platform solution to the different PC market sectors, and the only way to go is up.

Mr. Taylor was quite forthright with AMD’s current position in the market. He states – not verbatim, but close enough – that AMD is forced to compete in a market dominated by their main competitor’s strategy of mass advertising and continuing the paradigm of CPU performance – in which he admits, AMD cannot yet dominate at the high end of the market (i.e. Intel Extreme Quad versus the Phenom quad cores). He goes on to say however, that in the same way that consumers had to be weaned off the notion of CPU clock speed being king, the synergy of CPU and GPU, the platform strategy, and AMD’s obvious capabilities in these areas, are things that must be shown to the consumer bit-by-bit – the term forwarded by this editor was “grass-roots advertising”.  Besides, AMD is hardly staying still in the CPU department, with a new processor to supersede the 9850 black edition currently in the works. Again, no details for now, but be sure to check into this blog to learn more.

This entry is but a summary of the many initiatives AMD is currently working on; follow-up entries giving more detailed looks into specific movements will be posted in the following days. It’s surprising even for this editor how much is happening on the AMD front when like many susceptible consumers, I have been lulled to think of the high-end as the only area that counts when it comes to performance and the determination of the better brand. This of course is not true – even with my “enthusiast” side rebelling against the fact, it is certain that a paradigm of sorts have been in operation for a long time – one that frankly appeals to the enthusiast and thus indirectly influences the buying public. The computing scenario consists of much, much more, and AMD is in the unique position of having all of the most important components at hand to realize the fact, and do something for the general computing public that will shift this paradigm into one that can be summed up simply as “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”. More pictures to follow.

                                              Respected names from the industry were present in the 2 day, multi-product briefing.

                                             Terry Makedon, Manager for Software Product Management, stressing the merits of Catalyst drivers.