SUNNYVALE, CA, USA — At its annual Financial Analyst Day, AMD (NYSE: AMD) emerged a new “ambidextrous” strategy that builds upon the company’s long history of x86 and graphics innovation while embracing other technologies and intellectual property to deliver a variety of products.
AMD is adopting a SoC-centric roadmap designed to speed market-time, drive sustained execution, and enable the development of more tailored customer solutions. SoC design methodology is advantageous because it is a modular approach to processing design. It also leverages the best practice tools and microprocessor design flows with the ability to easily re-use IP and design blocks across a range of products.
“AMD’s strategy capitalizes on the convergence of technologies and devices that will define the next era of the industry,” said Rory Read, president and CEO, AMD. “The trends around consumers, cloud, and convergence will only grow stronger in the coming years. AMD has a unique opportunity to take advantage of this key industry inflection point. We remain focused on continuing the work we began last year to re-position AMD. Our new strategy will help AMD embrace the shifts occurring in the industry, joining market needs with innovative technologies and become a consistent growth engine.”
Road map Focus's on Customer Needs
Additionally, AMD today announced updates to its product roadmaps for AMD Central Processing Unit (CPU) and Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) products it plans to introduce in 2012 and 2013. The roadmap modifications address key customer priorities across form factors including ultrathin notebooks, tablets, desktops and servers with a clear focus on low power, emerging markets and the Cloud.
AMD’s updated product roadmap features second generation mainstream (“Trinity”) and low-power (“Brazos 2.0”) APUs for notebooks and desktops. It also features “Hondo,” an APU specifically designed for tablets; new CPU cores in 2012 and 2013 with “Piledriver” and its successor, “Steamroller,” as well as “Jaguar,” which is the successor to AMD’s popular “Bobcat.” In 2012, AMD plans to introduce four new AMD Opteron™ processors. For a more in-depth look at AMD’s updated product roadmap, please visit http://blogs.amd.com.
Next-generation Architecture Standardizes and Facilitates Software Development
AMD also provided further details on its Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA), which enables software developers to easily program APUs by combining scalar processing on the CPU with parallel processing on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). This provides high bandwidth access to memory at low power. AMD is proactively working to make HSA an open industry standard for the developing community. The company plans to hold its 2nd annual AMD Fusion Developer Summit in June, 2012.
New Company Structure Strengthens Execution
In conjunction with announcing its restructuring plan in November 2011, AMD has strengthened its leadership team with the additions of Mark Papermaster as senior vice president. The chief technology officer, Rajan Naik, chief strategy officer, and Lisa Su as senior vice president and general manager serve as the global business unit’s force. These executives will help ensure that sustainable, dependable execution becomes a hallmark of AMD.
