Future predictions and rumors.

These are some random thoughts I had over the weekend, finally took a minute to write a few of them down.

AMD Barcelona may be in production right now or should be in the next 30 days. If you figure the turn around time on chips AMD needs to be in production to have chips for delivery in June/July. However, AMD could announce that they are ready to take orders in June/July in which case they could delay slightly. However, juding by pent up demand (yours truely delaying several server and desktop purchases for the release of these new chips) it's very possible that they are building some inventory volume right now in order to meet demand.

So why isn't AMD talking about it? They've got a lot of old tech they are still trying to EOL (end of life) not just because their is less demand for it, but also because AMD is capacity contrained, so by removing chips that are less profitable and or less desirable to the market they free up production for the more desirable chips. Of course special requests (Dell's elcheapo lines) will keep some of those less desirable processors in market and in production.


AMD 4x4 Chipset. AMD will build one sooner or later. First, the whole AMD / Nvidia question was to have an across the board chip set like Centrinio or Viiv (rhymes with dive). With 4x4 being it's workstation c.l.a.s.s. (you cant say that word otherwise.. silly gamespot!!) product, it makes sense to have its chipset there. But it also makes sense to make it's chipset better. If you look at the design on the 4x4, one processor has to loop through the memory controller of the other in order to get to the outside world. Thats not terrible, but it does add latency and some potential perhipheral contention. Whats the solution? Take the chip set and give it a crossbar design from the native quad core chips.

This would allow the chipset to talk to both sockets directly without the current loop through. Further if you want to get really annoying. You can have processor to secondary chip set directly talk as well. This would allow socket 1 to talk to pcie16-A and socket2 to talk2 pcie16-B directly without having to share bus space. Granted with HT3.0 it's less of an issues, but the latency that builds up is always a concern.

Now add to that AMD's 'alien processor' slot. It lets a third party processor drop into an AMD motherboard. Fusion would be a good first candidate but it's going to need a lot of bandwidth to talk to the outside world, it's one more reason to have direct connectivity to the chipsets and processors.


Microsoft is a thorn to PC game developers. Right now, the bulk of the PC gamer community runs on DX9. DX10 is way better but there's not a lot of hardware for it in the market place. So DX9 rules. Game developers have to think about three targets now when writing software. DX9 on XP, DX9 on Vista, and DX10 on Vista. It's more work and it makes developing and supporting the PC more expensive. Add in that nVidia and ATi would both love it if XP could run DX10 and you have a mess.

MS will feel pressure to get DX10 on XP from the hardware vendors. Game developers would LOVE to only deal with DX10 and DX9 on XP and offer some token support to Vista until it actually has some market presence. Will MS backpeddle and release Xp-DX10? Maybe. Vista's adoption or lack there of will drive that.


AMD limited edition 45nm server chips? AMD unlike intel isn't in the race by itself. It has tech partnerships with others as well as outside fabs. Some of those outside Fabs are running at 45nm for some production. Depending on your view of AMD it's either just now getting into 45nm pre-production or it already had the ball rolling while 65nm was still in pre-production. If they're in production now, and the general transition time is one year for the first yeild-ready parts then we might see the first chips hitting in the Oct-Dec range. If they're just getting everything rolling now, then we're looking at a March-July range in 2008. AMD doesn't need 45nm to compete yet. It's 90nm parts were for the most part power/performance equal to most of intel's 65nm line. The new revision processors will likely play a similar game with intel's first 45nm line. AMD wants to win clearly in the power / performance race, so a push for 45nm tech makes sense.


Keep watching.