From X-bit Labs: The recent restructuring of Advanced Micro Devices seems to have drastic effects on the company’s roadmap. Earlier this year it transpired that the company has no plans to update its FX line of high-end desktop microprocessors in 2014 – 2015 timeframe. A new slide from AMD server roadmap indicates that the company has no plans to significantly update its server-class Opteron 4300-/6300-series microprocessors as well.
During a presentation at SC13 conference, Greg Rodgers, principal member of technical staff at AMD Research, was talking about heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) in clusters, reports insideHPC web-site. In addition, he revealed AMD server chip roadmap for 2014 – 2015 timeframe. As expected, AMD will offer Steamroller- and Excavator-based accelerated processing units and central processing units for uniprocessor servers in 2014 (code-named Berlin) and 2015 (code-named Toronto). Besides, the company will also offer ARM-based server solutions in the next couple of years.
What is surprising is that the company is not working on multi-core Steamroller- and Excavator-based multi-core microprocessors for 2-way and 4-way machines. In 2014 and 2015 the company will continue to sell twelve and sixteen cores Opteron 6300-series “Warsaw” processors with Piledriver cores. Essentially, this means that AMD will simply not focus on high-end server microprocessors in the next couple of years.
It is noteworthy that both Berlin and Toronto APUs and CPUs will be fully-fledged system-on-chips and will come with integrated I/O controllers, which will greatly simplify design of uniprocessor servers. Unfortunately, the chips will feature only up to four x86 cores and therefore will not be able to address the market of high-performance servers. AMD’s 2015 APUs and CPUs will get support for DDR4 memory.
As expected, AMD’s ARM-based Seattle and Cambridge CPUs will feature 4-8 64-bit ARM cores, DDR3 or DDR4 memory controllers, PCI Express 3.0, Freedom fabric and so on.
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