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AMD emerged as a serious threat to Intel in servers more than a decade ago, but after a series of missteps and bad chips, the company's server business is hanging on by a thread.
Now, AMD is rebooting its server chip business with the upcoming Zen CPU, which will also be used in PCs. AMD is getting creative with Zen and considering merging the CPU with a high-performance GPU to create a mega-chip for high-performance tasks.
"It's fair to say we do believe we can combine a high-performance CPU with the high-performance GPU," AMD CEO Lisa Su said during an earnings call on Thursday.
Su's comment was in response to a question on whether AMD would ultimately combine its Zen CPU with a GPU based on the upcoming Vega architecture into one big chip for enterprise servers and supercomputing.
"Obviously, it'll come in time," Su said. "It's an area where combining the two technologies makes a lot of sense."
It wouldn't be the first time AMD has built a mega-chip. It has already combined full-featured CPUs and GPUs on made-to-order chips for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 gaming consoles. The 5-billion transistor Xbox One chip uses an eight-core AMD CPU code-named Jaguar and a Radeon graphics processor.
GPUs are being used as co-processors in some of the world's fastest computers for tasks like weather modeling, economic forecasting, and weapons design. They are also used by Google in data centers for deep learning tasks. Nvidia has cornered the supercomputing space while AMD has struggled with its FirePro high-performance GPUs.
But AMD's integrated mega-chip would be unique. Nvidia has high-performance GPUs but lacks a CPU. Intel's CPUs dominate servers, but it does not offer a GPU. Some supercomputers combine Nvidia GPUs with CPUs from Intel or AMD.
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(Score: 2) by Gravis on Sunday July 24 2016, @07:37PM
AMD had a real chance at taking the server market by storm but they completely blew it multiple times by constantly delaying their 64-bit ARM server chips. whoever forced those chips onto the back burner really shot the company in the foot. now they are sending mixed signals and continuing to push their x86 for servers.
(Score: 2) by steveha on Sunday July 31 2016, @05:54AM
I completely disagree with this analysis.
Intel was trying to turn x86 into a dead end, and were only planning to release the "Itanic" (the Itanium) for 64-bit computing. This was because Intel wanted to be the sole source for 64-bit chips; since AMD was able to make x86, Intel was trying to get rid of x86. But AMD extended x86 to 64 bits, which was exactly what the market really wanted; it helped AMD that the Itanic was such a disaster.
Then Intel made things worse for themselves with the Pentium 4 family, a line of chips designed for clock rate above all else. These chips got less done per clock cycle, but Intel said that wouldn't matter because they were going to clock them up to 10 GHz or something like that. But it didn't work out. The Pentium 4 chips were just horrible.
During this time, AMD sold plenty of Opterons for high-end compute needs. During this time, AMD deserved to kick Intel to the curb. Itanic was a disaster, Pentium 4 was lousy, and AMD had chips with a better design. But Intel is huge and has lots of money and used contracts to get large vendors like Dell to keep buying Intel chips and not buy any AMD chips. This was purely anti-competitive, and would have been ruinous to do indefinitely, but it kept AMD from making a bunch of money to pay back their R&D costs and bought Intel time to catch up.
If I recall correctly, what happened next was that a small R&D division owned by Intel (in Israel I think) was playing around with the Pentium III design, doing a die shrink to make a low-power mobile part. This got more work done per clock cycle (by far!) than a Pentium 4 and scaled well. Intel grabbed it with both hands and it became the Core 2 line of chips. Sometimes it pays off to be as big as Intel is and have a bunch of divisions.
Then Intel corrected all the deficiencies in their chip designs, and pulled way ahead of AMD on process technology. With Intel being two generations ahead, AMD was hard-pressed to compete. That's why AMD is currently selling ridiculously high-Wattage CPU chips; they're trying to compete by selling 28 nanometer chips while Intel is down to 14 nanometer process.
But the company that fabs chips for AMD is ready to go to 14 nanometer now. They skipped one generation completely and now will be caught up to Intel. Intel will presently go to 10 nanometer, but for at least a moment AMD will be caught up. And 14 nm vs. 10 nm has got to be an easier battle than 28 nm vs 14 nm!
Also, the reports I'm reading say that AMD has improved their design and the new Zen chips should have 40% more work done per clock. So, caught up on process technology, design improved... AMD should be competitive again, and I fully expect AMD to win on price/performance.
I have a few HP N54L Microservers [wikia.com] with AMD Turion II chips in them. I would purely love an updated model, just like what I have but with a Zen chip.