AMD 2012-2013 roadmap

AMD is struggling to compete with Intel in the processor market when it comes to performance, this has been a recurring theme over the past two years but the brilliant success of Sandy Bridge and drastic failure of Bulldozer has made the gap arguably the widest it has ever been in the history of the modern computer. Therefore, it comes as no great surprise that AMD is revising its roadmap for the year 2012 to take the focus of its priorities from the processor market across to its APU designs.

AMD will be pushing ahead with the launch of Trinity which will utilise both the latest 32nm piledriver cores (reportedly 25% faster than the Llano cores) and discrete class Radeon Cores (same as those used in the HD 6000 series we believe). In addition to this AMD will revamp the highly successful Brazos architecture bringing out Brazos 2.0 to reflect the newest version. AMD also plans the launch of the “Hondo” range of APUs, which in essence are intended for Ultra Low Power or ULP systems. The Brazos 2.0 and Hondo architecture will all utilise 40nm whilst the APUs will bring the 32nm technology to the table. You can see more details in the attached slides.

However, what’s still very interesting is AMD is still pushing ahead with CPU development. Maybe with not as much rigor as before but AMD will be developing Bulldozer Version 2, to be named PileDriver or Vishera and essentially this will be a refined version of Bulldozer and hopefully provide dramatically better CPU performance without the horrendous power consumption figures we have seen from Bulldozer so far.

2013 sees AMD bringing in the third generation of of the APU called Kaveri, the Brazos 2.0 replacement Kabini and the Hondo replacement Temash. As far as Graphics go the second generation of 28nm cards will be released under the code name sea islands. In terms of the CPU market it appears AMD will expect Vishera to be the mainstay of late 2012 and the entire 2013 with no new CPU processors planned.

Source: PC Perspective