By Kristin Bent, CRN, February 10, 2012, 1230 hrs
AMD has announced its product development course for the next two years and revealed its plans for low-power servers, new system-on-a-chip products, and a hope of moving all desktop and notebook processors to 28-nm architectures.
But lurking somewhat in the background was AMD's two-year plan for its long-awaited entry into the tablet market, which has been a point of concern for the struggling chip maker.
AMD said it plans to make its debut in the tablet PC space this year with the launch of an ultra-low power APU (accelerated processing unit) dubbed Hondo and will also introduce its new Trinity APUs designed for ultra-thin laptops.
According to John Taylor, Director, Global Product Marketing, AMD, “Hondo, the company’s first-generation ultra-low power APU slated for release this year, won’t have a power consumption design suitable to run a tablet as thin as an iPad, which is about two watts. Instead, Hondo will most likely run in convertible tablets or tablets with thicker form factors.”
"Think of a somewhat thicker tablet form factor or a convertible form factor that's sometimes just a tablet and sometimes has some kind of a keyboard attached," Taylor told CRN. "It will be sealed or passively cooled."
Temash, the next ultra low-power APU on AMD’s roadmap set to launch in 2013, will still run at about three or four watts, Taylor said. This means it will still be limited to the same thicker or convertible tablet form factors as its predecessor Hondo. It also means the market will not see an AMD APU running at two watts or less until 2014.
In other words, the chip maker’s presence in true tablets as thin as an iPad, which is approximately 0.35 inches thick, won’t become a reality for another two years.
Steep competition and lengthy R&D timelines aside, Lisa Su, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Global Business Unit, AMD, is confident that the company can hit that two-watt mark over the next two years.
"From a growth standpoint, it's clear that ultra-thins and tablets will be two of the biggest growth vectors in the mobile space, and we are going to go after that with a vengeance,” said Su. "What we see there is taking all of the low-power techniques that we know about, we can absolutely get x86 to less than 2 watts."
Introducing a two watt APU in 2014 will put AMD nearly two years behind Intel’s Atom Medfield mobile processor and even further behind ARM’s low-power architectures found in iPad’s today. But Sergis Mushell, Principal Analyst, Gartner, told CRN that AMD still stands a fighting chance in the tablet market, and not necessarily because of its CPU technology.
Even if AMD chips do not reach that two watt target until 2014, Mushell said, the company’s long-standing GPU product line may ultimately give it a leg up against Intel. As more and more tablet computing happens at the cloud level, rather than the device level, graphics and presentation, rather than computational performance, will become a larger focus for tablet manufacturers.
Mushell noted that AMD could potentially follow the same model leveraged by Nvidia, another chip maker with a strong GPU heritage. Nvidia relies on ARM architectures to hit the computing and low-power benchmarks of its mobile Tegra chips, but what has really fuelled the chips’ success is Nvidia’s graphics. AMD could take this same approach.
"Nvidia had the GPU heritage and then they licensed ARM and went into mobile devices, so it’s not a far stretch," Mushell said.
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