Talking about moving forward, the feel is that AMD is there to survive and thrive once again. Rather than repeating the bland statements of 'we don't want to compete in the high end, just on volume' which make no sense since a fabless company cannot compete on volumes against a competitor with seven large fabs at its disposal, this time there's clear indication
that, after Piledriver, there will be substantial changes in both cores and system architecture from Steamroller onwards, that should help make AMD competitive closer to the top. I was told that delaying the socket migration beyond the AM3+, C32 and G34 to new socket is a good move,since AMD can design more aggressive, rather than stop gap, sockets for future platforms with better features like more memory and HyperTransport channels, as well as integrated PCIe v3, for greater future scalability. For the first time, some execs do acknowledge that Bulldozer approach may not have been the best one at the time, and things need to change. I was told that there is some good frequency scalability in the Piledriver core which should help gain some per-core performance ground.
So, in the near term, AMD will use APU to keep its presence in desktop and mobile market, and even low power 5 - 10 W part derivatives or Trinity may arrive for high-end HD++ tablets. The CPU core radical refresh is expected to complete within two years from now, along with brand new socket platforms, proving AMD a new base from which to attack the high end, again, just like in the good old Opteron/Althon 64 early times. The GPUs will continue to be the crown jewel of the company till then, though... expect new high end mobile HD7900 series later this month, and Sea Islands by yearend.
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