AMD sets out its plans for 2013, hints at a possible ARM future
AMD today laid out its plans for the next couple of years at its Financial Analyst Day. The plans are a mix of familiar and logical extensions of the company's current products, but contained some more surprising elements: specifically, AMD opened the door to future processors that include ARM CPUs.
The underlying themes to AMD's plans are faster iteration—a GPU-like 18-24 months between CPU designs, compared to the current 3 or more years—achieved by moving away from custom designs and depending more heavily on synthesized chip layouts, and lower power usage. This in turn will give AMD more flexibility to integrate CPUs and GPUs—and potentially other co-processors too—into what the company calls APUs (accelerated processing units).
On the client side, this year AMD will release three APU lines: Trinity, aimed at the performance mobile and mainstream desktop segment, the low power desktop and mobile Brazos 2.0, and the ultra low power tablet-oriented Hondo. Trinity's CPU portion will be based on Piledriver, the successor to AMD's Bulldozer architecture. Each Trinity will pair one or two Piledriver modules (offering two or four threads) with an AMD 7000-series second generation Direct3D 11 GPU (though this may be marketing-ese, and it could be a 6000-series part branded as 7000-series).
