AMD's Bobcat and Bulldozer

[Mechromancer]

@JF-AMD - Have had a chance to read the Arstechnica writeup on Bulldozer/Bobcat?

Fighting the last war

AMD always succeeds when it attacks Intel not where the latter is strong, but where it is weak. Historically, AMD's biggest wins have come when the company moved into an obvious hole in Intel's product line. For example, when Intel announced that EPIC and Itanium would be its 64-bit upgrade path, AMD countered with x86-64 and scored a huge victory in the server market. Or, when delays with the QuickPath Interconnect forced Intel to stick with its aging frontside bus architecture for way too long, AMD exploited its superior HyperTransport interconnect to pursue the multisocket server market. When Intel was pushing RAMBUS and, later, the power-hungry FB-DIMM, AMD stuck with cheaper DDR and gained a platform-level performance/watt advantage.

Right now, there are no obvious weak spots in Intel's conventional server platform; indeed, Intel's Xeon line is as strong as it has ever been. (Mobile is a different story, but that's a topic for later.) Insofar as Bulldozer is aimed at the server market, AMD is attacking Intel when and where the larger chipmaker is at its absolute strongest.

But notice that I said "conventional server platform" above. There is one obvious gap in Intel's current suite of datacenter offerings: Intel isn't directly pursuing low-power, high-density cloud servers, and this is a gap that both ARM and startups like SeaMicro are looking to fill with very dense server offerings based on mobile technologies (e.g., physicalization solutions).

If I ran AMD, I would redirect the company's effort toward building a low-cost, low-power, high-density, flash-based cloud server platform around Bobcat. Intel's Justin Rattner has admitted that for certain cloud workloads, these types of high-density solutions are superior to a monolithic server chip like Xeon. So AMD should stop obsessing over netbooks and monolithic server parts—both of these amount to fighting the last war—and just jump straight into the cloud server market that ARM is set to tackle with its upcoming Eagle part.

To do this would be to attack Intel where it is weak, because Intel's current answer to this is still in the labs. Intel will probably keep puttering away at its experimental Single Chip Cloud Computer, while pushing Xeon at cloud vendors and losing rack space to ARM-based systems. AMD could jump right in with something like Bobcat and be well-established as the go-to maker of high-density x86 servers before the SCCC makes it to market.

Will AMD take this advice? Probably not, and if it doesn't, Bulldozer better be very good.

Does AMD have plans to attack this new segment in the server market?