News AMD | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net KitGuru.net - Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards Wed, 31 Jan 2018 18:47:21 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://www.kitguru.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/cropped-KITGURU-Light-Background-SQUARE2-32x32.png News AMD | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net 32 32 AMD confirms silicon changes will be made to protect Zen 2 processors from Spectre https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/matthew-wilson/amd-confirms-silicon-changes-will-be-made-to-protect-zen-2-processors-from-spectre/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/matthew-wilson/amd-confirms-silicon-changes-will-be-made-to-protect-zen-2-processors-from-spectre/#respond Wed, 31 Jan 2018 18:47:21 +0000 https://www.kitguru.net/?p=362576 During AMD's recent quarterly earnings call, the company dropped several interesting pieces of information. Firstly, GPU production is going to be ramped up to meet demand, though memory shortages are slowing things down a bit. Secondly, in the wake of Spectre, AMD will be working to ensure that its upcoming Zen 2 architecture will be …

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During AMD's recent quarterly earnings call, the company dropped several interesting pieces of information. Firstly, GPU production is going to be ramped up to meet demand, though memory shortages are slowing things down a bit. Secondly, in the wake of Spectre, AMD will be working to ensure that its upcoming Zen 2 architecture will be free of these exploits for good.

Intel has previously announced that it is already preparing new CPUs with changes that will address the Spectre security flaw. AMD will be doing the same with Zen 2. Later this year, AMD will be rolling out new Ryzen processors based on Zen+, which contains some changes to improve performance. After that, the company will be turning its attention to Zen 2, which will be AMD's first 7nm CPU product.

AMD's current processors aren't particularly vulnerable to Spectre or Meltdown. Due to the company's architecture differences compared to Intel or ARM, AMD's processors are not affected by Meltdown and are only susceptible to one variant of the Spectre bug, though it is particularly difficult to exploit. Patches are being put in place to protect current AMD processor users from this bug and in the future, changes will be made at the silicon and microcode levels to ensure it is never an issue again.

Here is how AMD CEO, Lisa Su, put it during the earnings call: “We continue to believe that Variant 2 of Spectre is difficult to exploit on AMD processors. However, we are deploying CPU microcode patches that in combination with OS updates provide additional mitigation steps. Longer term, we have included changes in our future processor cores, starting with our Zen 2 design, to further address potential Spectre like exploits.”

A leaked roadmap from September 2017 points to a 2019 launch date for AMD's first ‘Zen 2' chips. These will be based on the 7nm architecture, which is proving to be a challenge for engineers, so dates could change.

KitGuru Says: Given how big of a scare the Spectre bug has been over the last few weeks, it's not too surprising to hear that changes are already being put in place for future products. Still, it is always exciting to hear updates on future releases, like Zen 2, which will be AMD's first 7nm based processor architecture.

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AMD to boost energy efficiency of APUs by 25 times by 2020 https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-boost-energy-efficiency-of-apus-by-25-times-by-2020/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-boost-energy-efficiency-of-apus-by-25-times-by-2020/#comments Sat, 29 Nov 2014 15:35:28 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=224135 Advanced Micro Devices recently set a goal to improve energy efficiency of its accelerated processing units by 25 times by 2020. To achieve this goal, AMD will have to outpace historical energy efficiency trend by over 70 per cent, but the company claims it knows what to do and even outlined a roadmap about features …

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Advanced Micro Devices recently set a goal to improve energy efficiency of its accelerated processing units by 25 times by 2020. To achieve this goal, AMD will have to outpace historical energy efficiency trend by over 70 per cent, but the company claims it knows what to do and even outlined a roadmap about features it needs to implement.

There are several trends in the personal computing industry (note that PCs today are largely mobile PCs in different form-factors). First, devices need to get thinner, slimmer and lighter. Second, devices need to gain battery life. Third, user interfaces need to get more intuitive and user friendly. Fourth, overall performance and feature-set of devices need to improve. While the first two trends require consistent decrease of power consumption by PC components, another two require increase of compute performance. Unfortunately, it is impossible to improve processing speed at a rapid pace and lower power consumption significantly at the same time, which is why developers of devices and their components have to balance between the two.

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When it comes to compute units, the balance between the amount of processing work they can do and their power consumption is called energy efficiency. The general term itself is very broad, abstract and does not exactly consider use cases. For example, if a 35W notebook processor offers two times higher performance than a 35W processor released a year ago, one could say that its energy efficiency improved by two times, but the problem is that 35W processors no longer fit into modern notebooks. As a result, in the real world one has to find ways to reduce power consumption slowly while gradually improving compute performance. In many cases, chip designers take step-by-step approach and focus on either performance or power consumption.

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Historically power consumption and performance (and the balance between the two, energy efficiency) were determined by manufacturing technologies, micro architectural peculiarities as well as various hardware tweaks. For a number of years now AMD has been saying that in order to improve energy efficiency going forward, software needs to use the right hardware for particular tasks. Paralleled tasks need to be computed on highly parallel GPU cores (since it takes them less time to get the work done, they also consume lower amount of energy than genera-purpose cores), whereas serial tasks have to be performed on general-purpose CPU cores. AMD believes that as software starts to use heterogeneous processing capabilities of modern processing units through OpenCL application programming interface, energy efficiency of PCs will improve over time.

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But while AMD pins a lot of hopes on its accelerated processing units and future software, it does not plan to give up improvements on the hardware level. Among the things AMD intends to implement in its next-generation APUs and CPUs are integrated voltage regulation, ability to scale voltage per every part of a chip, inter-frame power gating, voltage adaptive operation and so on, according to a presentation by the company. Among other things, AMD proposes to dynamically boost performance in certain applications to get the job done quicker and save power on the system level. At the same time, AMD plans to implement an intelligent technology that does prevents dynamic increase of clock-rates for apps that do not benefit significantly from higher frequencies. In general, AMD intends to enable its chips to fine-tune their performance based on workload and environment contexts.

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It should be noted that reduced power consumption is only a part of the equation in the energy efficiency metrics. Performance is an important thing since low-performance chips will not able to compute next-generation workloads. Therefore, it is tremendously important that AMD's microprocessors based on the code-named “Xen” (x86) and “K12” (ARMv8) micro-architectures deliver higher performance compared to today's general-purpose cores; it is equally important that AMD's future graphics processing units also deliver significantly better performance than today's GPUs. Regrettably, AMD said no word about how it plans to increase performance of its central processing and graphics processing units or, at least, what kind of increases should we expect.

Traditionally, AMD sets goals, but does not reveal exact plans. It is unknown which technologies will be incorporated into next-generation Carrizo processor and which will be integrated into its successors. The only thing we do know is that AMD has a technology roadmap for many years to come and that plan will be gradually executed.

amd_energy_efficiency_4 amd_energy_efficiency_3 amd_energy_efficiency_2

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KitGuru Says: While AMD sets pretty ambitious goals in terms of improving energy efficiency of its platforms, one should keep in mind that a lot of things depend on third-party PC components, software, workloads and use scenarios. As a result, expect AMD (and others’) compute platforms to gain energy efficiency going forward, it is just a natural process. Still, when it comes to commercial products, they need to hit actual performance and power consumption targets to be successful, not just feature abstract energy efficiency.

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AMD posts higher revenue for the quarter, but still loses money https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov/amd-posts-higher-revenue-for-the-quarter-but-still-loses-money/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov/amd-posts-higher-revenue-for-the-quarter-but-still-loses-money/#comments Fri, 18 Jul 2014 22:25:08 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=203653 Advanced Micro Devices this week reported its financial results for the second quarter of 2014. The company did not manage to take advantage of corporate PC replacements, like its rival Intel did, but sales of chips for video game consoles allowed the firm to post rather significant increase in revenue compared to the same quarter a …

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Advanced Micro Devices this week reported its financial results for the second quarter of 2014. The company did not manage to take advantage of corporate PC replacements, like its rival Intel did, but sales of chips for video game consoles allowed the firm to post rather significant increase in revenue compared to the same quarter a year ago. Unfortunately, just like in the Q1 of 2014, AMD could not make any money and even extended its losses in Q2 2014.

For the second quarter of 2014 the Sunnyvale, California-based chip designer reported revenue of $1.44 billion, an increase of 3 per cent sequentially and a massive upsurge of 24 per cent year-over-year. AMD reported operating income of $63 million and net loss of $36 million, or $0.05 per share. AMD lost money in the Q2 2014 because of $49 million of loss from debt redemption in the quarter. The company’s gross-margin remained at 35 per cent, which is below gross margin of its direct rivals, Intel Corp. and Nvidia Corp.

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AMD’s computing solutions segment (CSS) revenue was $669 million, an increase of 1 per cent sequentially and a decrease of 20 per cent year-over-year (YoY). AMD’s CSS division earned $9 million in profit during the quarter. The company said that in the Q2 2014 sales of its platforms for notebooks increased, whereas shipments of its desktop platforms decreased. Thanks to higher amount of mobile chips in AMD’s product mix, microprocessor average selling prices (ASPs) increased sequentially and year-over-year. The company blames lower sales of desktop parts for its massive YoY CSS revenue decline.

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AMD’s graphics and visual solutions (GVS) division earned $772 million in revenue, an increase of 5 per cent sequentially and 141 per cent year-over-year. The unit’s profit for the quarter was $82 million compared with $91 million in Q1 2014 and breakeven in Q2 2013. The reason for the incredibly high YoY increase is the fact that AMD GVS now ships semi-custom system-on-chips that power Microsoft Xbox One and Sony PlayStation4 video game consoles. Last year the company simply did not ship them in the second quarter. Because significantly lower sales of graphics cards in the channel, the company said its GPU revenue was down both sequentially and compared to the same period a year ago. Average sales prices of graphics processors also decreased during the quarter despite of increased sales of professional graphics cards.

amd_q2_2014_financial_results

Even though the company manages to increase its revenue thanks to sales of semi-custom SoCs, it looks like it does not receive a lot of profits from such chips. In the first quarter of the year AMD lost $20 million, in the second quarter the losses increased to $36 million.

While the semi-custom business seems to be very attractive, the company still needs the market of personal computers to be profitable. In order to win the PC market, AMD needs to sell competitive microprocessors and graphics processing units. While the latter are on par with competing solutions from Nvidia, the former are considerably behind processors from Intel.

For the third quarter of 2014, AMD expects revenue to increase by around 2 per cent sequentially.

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KitGuru Says: While the plan to sell semi-custom SoCs to large companies like Microsoft and Sony certainly pays off, it is noteworthy that shipments of lucrative central processing units/accelerated processing units and graphics processing units have been declining for several quarters now. Without competitive micro-processing and graphics processing technologies AMD will be unable to design competitive semi-custom chips for large clients eventually. At the end, AMD still need to be serious about its core x86 and graphics businesses.

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AMD to increase energy efficiency of APUs by 25 times by 2020 https://www.kitguru.net/components/apu-components/anton-shilov/amd-to-increase-energy-efficiency-of-apus-by-25-times-by-2020/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/apu-components/anton-shilov/amd-to-increase-energy-efficiency-of-apus-by-25-times-by-2020/#respond Fri, 20 Jun 2014 05:11:28 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=199160 Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday unveiled a rather bold strategy called 25X20 under which it intends to dramatically increase energy efficiency of its accelerated processing units by the year 2020. In the next six years AMD plans to further optimize power consumption of its chips and also increase their performance, which is projected to result …

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Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday unveiled a rather bold strategy called 25X20 under which it intends to dramatically increase energy efficiency of its accelerated processing units by the year 2020. In the next six years AMD plans to further optimize power consumption of its chips and also increase their performance, which is projected to result in 25 times higher energy efficiency by 2020.

“Through APU architectural enhancements and intelligent power efficient techniques, our customers can expect to see us dramatically improve the energy efficiency of our processors during the next several years,” said Mark Papermaster, chief technology officer at AMD, during a keynote at the China International Software and Information Service Fair (CISIS) conference in Dalian, China. “Setting a goal to improve the energy efficiency of our processors 25 times by 2020 is a measure of our commitment and confidence in our approach.”

Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors capable of being built in a given area doubles roughly every two years. According to a research by Jonathan Koomey from Stanford University, energy efficiency of processors has closely tracked the rate of improvement predicted by Moore’s Law, which is logical since newer processors usually deliver higher performance while reducing power consumption compared to predecessors. AMD hopes that four fundamental things will help it to outpace the historical efficiency trend predicted by Moore’s Law (by Dr. Koomey’s derivative from the law, to be precise) by at least 70 per cent between 2014 and 2020.

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The four important elements of AMD 25X20 plan are:

  • Intelligent power management – various methods of power management have been implemented into chips over the years, so AMD will just continue to refine them in the future. AMD says that going forward, many differentiating capabilities such as inter-frame power gating, per-part adaptive voltage, voltage islands, further integration of system components, and other techniques still in the development stage should yield accelerated gains.
  • Architectural advances – the less time it takes to get the job done, the more time a chip spends in in idle mode. Therefore, the better AMD’s x86, ARM and graphics architectures are, the more power-efficient they get thanks to the fact that they can do more job while consuming less amount of power than their predecessors.
  • Popularization of the heterogeneous computing – graphics processing units and special-purpose accelerators can perform many tasks better and more efficiently than general-purpose x86 or ARM cores. Therefore, the more programs take advantage of the heterogeneous computing technologies, the more energy efficient the PC becomes.
  • New process technologies – a traditional way to reduce power consumption of a circuit is to make using thinner process technologies. AMD expects that 14nm/16nm, 10nm and 7nm process technologies will help it to further decrease power consumption of its products by 2020.

Industry analyst firm Tirias Research recently studied AMD’s methodology for evaluating its energy efficiency and the plans to achieve a 25x improvement by 2020 and produced a publicly-available white paper detailing their analysis.

“The goal of an energy-efficient processor is to deliver more performance than the prior generation at the same or less power,” said Kevin Krewell, analyst at Tirias Research. “AMD’s plan to accelerate the energy-efficiency gains for its mobile-computing processors is impressive. We believe that AMD will achieve its energy efficiency goal, partially through process improvement but mostly by combining the savings from reducing idle power, the performance boost of heterogeneous system architecture, and through more intelligent power management. With this undertaking, AMD demonstrates leadership in the computing industry, driving innovations for a more energy-efficient future.”

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KitGuru Says: With its new 25X20 message to the world AMD wants to say that going forward it would accelerate improvements of its products faster than it has done before. Since in order to increase power efficiency it is necessary to boost performance in addition to implementation of various other methods, expect the chip designer to actually focus on performance in the future. Let’s just hope that AMD will succeed with its plan.

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AMD reorgs further: sets up two business groups, shuffles execs https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov/amd-reorgs-further-sets-up-two-business-groups-shuffles-executives/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov/amd-reorgs-further-sets-up-two-business-groups-shuffles-executives/#respond Thu, 12 Jun 2014 22:55:18 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=198130 Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday announced “the latest” step in its strategic transformations. Starting from the 1st of July, AMD will consist of two large business groups led by Lisa Su and John Byrne, two executives who have been very efficient in their current roles. In a bid to further increase efficiency of AMD, the …

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Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday announced “the latest” step in its strategic transformations. Starting from the 1st of July, AMD will consist of two large business groups led by Lisa Su and John Byrne, two executives who have been very efficient in their current roles.

In a bid to further increase efficiency of AMD, the company will form two large market-focused business units responsible for all aspects of product strategy, product execution, sales and operations. Since the amount of groups within AMD will dramatically decrease, Lisa Su, who is currently responsible for all business units, will become the chief operating officer.

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The new groups are:

  • The Computing and Graphics Business Group (CGBG). The unit will absorb AMD’s client, consumer graphics and professional graphics businesses, as well as their related product engineering and sales functions. AMD chief sales officer John Byrne has been appointed senior vice president and general manager responsible for leading the computing and graphics business group.
  • The Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom Business Group (EESCBG). The business unit will combine AMD’s server, embedded, dense server and semi-custom businesses, as well as their related product engineering and sales functions. Dr. Su will be the acting lead until the new head is appointed.

“During the past two years, we have been successfully executing our three-step strategy to reset, accelerate and ultimately transform AMD,” said Rory Read, chief executive officer of AMD. “Today’s announcement represents the next step in our long-term strategic plan to help ensure AMD’s operating structure and culture are better aligned to drive consistent growth and profitability by leveraging our leadership IP to create differentiated products that help our customers win across a diversified set of high-growth markets.”

While the new transformation at AMD looks rather logical from many points of view (e.g., sales organizations will be tailored for particular markets), it brings a number of things that may not be particularly good for the company.

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The new CGBG looks to be very consumer oriented as a business unit. The group will ultimately sell products to the end-user (either through the channel or through various OEMs), yet, it will likely be responsible for engineering the core graphics and general-purpose processing technologies for the whole AMD (i.e. for itself and for the EESCBG) as there are no separate research & development or architecture groups. While the CGBG is clearly interested in developing the best products possible, it remains to be seen whether the unit will invest enough into technologies required strictly for servers, enterprises or custom system-on-chips.

The EESCBG will work with large customers, such as server makers, producers of embedded devices as well as big companies looking for semi-custom silicon. The unit will design Opteron products, develop various embedded chips (such as the project Skybridge SoCs based on ARM or x86 cores), create custom SoCs for various devices (such as video game consoles) and will resell highly-integrated Fusion processors developed by the CGBG under its moniker.

While AMD’s ambidextrous strategy should allow the CGBG and the EESCBG to fetch technologies from each other, it should be noted that those technologies will be developed with certain applications in mind and may not deliver the right performance or feature-set for all types of devices. For example, while both CGBG and EESCBG need high-performance x86 cores for their chips, the latter needs microprocessor cores with integrated RAS [reliability, availability, serviceability] capabilities to address future-generation high-end servers.

In general, the reorganization of AMD looks good since the company will be able to better address particular needs of its customers. However, at present it is impossible to say how this all will work out in the long-term future.

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KitGuru Says: An interesting side effect of the reorganization is that starting from now it will be impossible to compare financial result of AMD with its results from the previous years. For example, we do know that sales of AMD microprocessors have been decreasing for a number of years now. However, since there will be no division responsible solely for central processing units (CPUs), it will be impossible to say where AMD’s CPUs are going based on the company’s financial results.

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