Another day, another purported leak of content ahead of AMD’s Analyst Day on May 6, 2015. These new slides show AMD’s product plans for the next year, and while they aren’t verified, they do make sense — at least, to a point. This new data applies to both the company’s desktop and mobile plans — if, of course, it’s accurate.
Desktop performance is probably more interesting to a number of AMD’s faithful, so we’ll start with that (below). There aren’t many surprises here — Godavari is the Kaveri refresh that’s reportedly shipping later this year (AMD has been quiet on the details), while Beema has been in market already for quite some time. Godavari isn’t expected to introduce much in the way of new performance — think clock tweaks and possibly some better power consumption figures. The claim here is that 2016 will usher in a new stack, from Summit Ridge at the top, with up to eight Zen CPU cores, to Bristol Ridge below, with up to four Zen cores and an on-die HSA stack.
Note that none of the chips shown here make use of the enormous HBM buffers or inflated core counts that were shown last week in a purported slide leak. The new 14nm platform would usher in an FM3 socket, which is supposed to utilize DDR4 (RAM type and support isn’t mentioned in these documents). Note that if true, this would put AMD’s APUs and CPUs on the same platform — you might be able to drop an 8-core desktop chip into an APU motherboard or vice versa.
Anchoring the budget line we have Basilisk, with up to two Zen cores and a GCN-based GPU as well. The Puma line of CPUs that began with Brazos is effectively finished at this point.
In mobility, we see the 20nm “Amur” APU supposedly debuting in ultra-low power with up to four Cortex-A57 CPUs and a GCN GPU, but no mention of the HSA compatibility that was supposed to define the entire Project Skybridge platform. Carrizo and Carrizo-L occupy the Performance and low-power brackets, as expected. Supposedly Bristol Ridge with up to four Zen CPU cores and Basilisk with up to two cores dominate the 2016 market, with a pair of “Styx” K12 cores also debuting in ultra-low power.
The grains of salt
There are a few things to keep in mind regarding this roadmap. First, unless AMD claims differently at its Analyst Day, this document is fundamentally inaccurate. Zen is not expected to launch for at least 12 months, which means the 2015 designs really ought to extend halfway into 2016, at the least. Some rumors have suggested Zen would drop even later, in the back half of next year.
Second, there are definite oddities on the mobile side. With Windows RT dead, there’s simply no demand for ARM devices running Windows. AMD’s K12 core may have a market in the server business or in mobile products, but if they intend to ship it in an ARM device they’re going to run face-first into a dead-end market.
If these slides are true, they raise as many questions as they answer, particularly concerning why AMD would launch an ultra-low power ARM CPU. True, it could theoretically make an ARM play in Android, but AMD has never shown much interest or ability to comprehensively attack the Android market.
As things stand, the desktop roadmap makes more sense than the mobile one. We’ve also covered Zen’s potential architecture and design principles — AMD appears to have some fairly serious (and likely intentional) leaks.
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AMD’s desktop, mobile roadmaps for 2016 may have just leaked
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