semi-custom | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net KitGuru.net - Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards Sat, 18 Jul 2015 13:25:33 +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 semi-custom | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net 32 32 AMD begins development of its third major semi-custom design https://www.kitguru.net/components/anton-shilov/amd-begins-development-of-its-third-major-semi-custom-design/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/anton-shilov/amd-begins-development-of-its-third-major-semi-custom-design/#comments Sat, 18 Jul 2015 12:01:35 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=259656 Advanced Micro Devices recently started to design its third semi-custom accelerated processing unit for an undisclosed customer. Some believe that this third semi-custom system-on-chip will eventually power Nintendo’s next-generation game console code-named “NX”. However, AMD claims that the new SoC “expands the base” of its semi-custom business beyond gaming, which means that the APU is …

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Advanced Micro Devices recently started to design its third semi-custom accelerated processing unit for an undisclosed customer. Some believe that this third semi-custom system-on-chip will eventually power Nintendo’s next-generation game console code-named “NX”. However, AMD claims that the new SoC “expands the base” of its semi-custom business beyond gaming, which means that the APU is not developed with a game console in mind.

“We have started a new design this quarter that we believe expands our base for the semi-custom business and we are very pleased with that,” said Lisa Su, chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices, during the company’s earnings conference call with investors and financial analysts. “The base semi-custom business is around the game consoles.”

amd_fusion_semi_custon_chip_universe

AMD announced two new semi-custom SoC design wins back in October, 2014. Both chips will integrate AMD Radeon graphics, one will be based on ARM architecture, another one will feature x86 general-purpose cores. One of the APUs is projected to power a “beyond gaming device”. Details about another have never been disclosed, but it is possible that it is a SoC for a gaming device. The two semi-custom system-on-chips are projected to bring the company combined total lifetime revenue of approximately $1 billion over approximately three years starting 2016.

Considering relatively short amount of time between the start of development and actual revenue shipments of AMD's third semi-custom design, it looks like the system-on-chip will not be something very complex. According to comments made by AMD around two years ago, it took it less than 24 months to design, build and tune system-on-chip for Sony PlayStation 4. However, it took years to determine requirements for the SoC as well as its architecture.

amd_semi_custom_fusion_strategy

The third semi-custom design is expected to bring the first revenue to AMD in the second half of 2016. AMD expects that the addition of this APU will help the company to further grow its semi-custom business.

“I think we will still see 2016 to be a fairly solid year for the traditional, let's call it game console business, overall,” said Ms. Su. “Then as we layer on top of it some of the new wins, I think that does give us potential to grow in the second half of the year. Obviously, there is a lot to happen between now and then, but I do see semi-custom as a growth driver for us going forward.”

amd_fusion_semi_custon_chip

So far, AMD has received around $3 billion in revenue for its semi-custom SoCs that power Microsoft Xbox One and Sony PlayStation 4. The two consoles have been in production for about two years now.

While semi-custom chip business is stable and predictable, something that is important for AMD, which has not been very successful on its traditional PC and server markets in the recent years, it is not very profitable. AMD admitted last year that its console SoCs are sold with 15 – 20 per cent margin, which is considerably below typical margins for fabless semiconductor companies in general and AMD in particular.

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KitGuru Says: In fact, even combined total lifetime revenue of approximately $1 billion over approximately three years for two chips indicate that both products are rather basic and inexpensive. It is unlikely that they will power devices that are sold in very high volumes (i.e., tens of millions of units).

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AMD makes ‘significant investments’ in server CPUs https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-makes-significant-investments-in-standard-and-custom-server-cpus/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-makes-significant-investments-in-standard-and-custom-server-cpus/#comments Fri, 17 Apr 2015 11:46:10 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=245541 Advanced Micro Devices continues to express confidence that its next-generation high-performance general-purpose processing cores – known as “K12” and “Zen” – will be successful on the market of servers. After exiting the market of micro-servers by shutting down SeaMicro, AMD now focuses on development of high-performance microprocessors for x86 and ARM-powered machines. “The x86 server …

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Advanced Micro Devices continues to express confidence that its next-generation high-performance general-purpose processing cores – known as “K12” and “Zen” – will be successful on the market of servers. After exiting the market of micro-servers by shutting down SeaMicro, AMD now focuses on development of high-performance microprocessors for x86 and ARM-powered machines.

“The x86 server market is a very large market and it is one, where we have historically been successful,” said Lisa Su, chief executive officer of AMD, in the company’s quarterly conference call with investors and financial analysts. “I do believe that it is an area that we can grow over the mid-term.”

AMD is expected to release server-class Opteron processors based on “Zen” and “K12” cores in 2016. Nothing particular is known about these upcoming Opteron chips except of the fact that they will be made using 14nm or 16nm FinFET process technologies. AMD claims that it is increasing investments in its enterprise, embedded and semi-custom (EESC) business unit in order to develop appropriate solutions for servers. Keeping in mind the fact that design of FinFET chips alone costs tens to hundreds millions of dollars – roughly three times more than design of chips with planar transistors – AMD simply has to increase its investments in order to develop its new server chips.

amd_opteron_6300_hand

AMD realizes that in the modern world many owners of large cloud datacenters, such as Amazon Web Services or Facebook, require semi-custom and full-custom chips to run their servers. As a result, in addition to developing standard processors, the company is also designing special-purpose hardware blocks (e.g., hardware accelerators for security, storage, networking and virtualization applications), which could be used for semi-custom system-on-chips for servers.

“We are making significant investments in standard server processors as well as in the IP for semicustom opportunities,” added Ms. Su. “Think of it as x86, ARM, the other technologies required to make competitive server products.”

Although AMD continues to talk about its server opportunities, it does not reveal any particular plans about its new Opteron chips, such as availability timeframes. All we know about AMD’s server strategy today is that the company wants to address cloud and enterprise datacenters as well as networking segments with standard and semi-custom products.

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KitGuru Says: AMD is expected to reveal more details about its server and, possibly, high-performance CPU, strategy in May at its financial analysts day event. Hopefully, in about three weeks we’ll learn more details about its Opteron chips featuring “Zen” and “K12” cores.

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Intel: First full-custom Xeon CPUs are due next year https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/intel-first-full-custom-xeon-cpus-are-due-next-year/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/intel-first-full-custom-xeon-cpus-are-due-next-year/#respond Fri, 06 Feb 2015 12:27:12 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=234454 The needs of modern cloud datacenters require developers of microprocessors to implement certain custom functionality into their products. As reported, Intel Corp. has incorporated multiple special-purpose technologies into its latest Xeon platform and offers optimized versions of CPUs to select customers. However, the company still does not offer chips that are designed for particular clients …

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The needs of modern cloud datacenters require developers of microprocessors to implement certain custom functionality into their products. As reported, Intel Corp. has incorporated multiple special-purpose technologies into its latest Xeon platform and offers optimized versions of CPUs to select customers. However, the company still does not offer chips that are designed for particular clients from the ground up. This is something Intel will do next year.

“We are well into the semi-custom product, we will be into the custom product space over the next year or so,” said Stacy Smith, chief financial officer of Intel, in an interview with Barron’s.

intel_xeon_e7_v2

Intel has a special roadmap for its custom products. Intel can customize its server platforms or processors themselves to support custom controllers, FPGAs or even memory solutions. Intel can also optimize performance and power consumption of chips for certain workloads and deployments. At present Intel has 35 custom Xeon processors that belong to the Grantley platform. Intel can also include intellectual property of its customers into its standard microprocessors. For example, four of such features are already present in the latest-generation Xeon “Haswell-EP” central processing units and two more features are in development for upcoming chips.

Intel understands that the only trump the competing architectures or designers of server processors will have against it when they manage to hit performance targets of modern datacentres will be customization and ability to maximally tailor their offerings for particular clients. Intel knows that its indisputable trump is high-performance x86 architecture; therefore, it needs to ensure that software is tailored for its instruction set, not for ARM or Power. Thus, Intel wants to take the potential advantage of customization away from its hypothetic rivals by working very closely with large customers like Amazon Web Services, Google, Facebook or Microsoft. As a result, they will keep using Intel’s x86 processors and will not deploy chips powered by competing architectures.

“We are building in the capabilities to start to do custom products of the big players, which they love, and which lets us partner more deeply to help them solve the problems that they need to solve over the next couple of years,” said Mr. Smith.

intel_xeon_standard_to_custom

At present Intel is working with ten customers on full custom central processing units, which will be developed from scratch keeping in mind particular requirements. Such CPUs are going to contain IP from clients, custom I/O configuration and special configuration of execution engines.

“With the cloud guys, work directly with the big cloud players, such that we can take some of their secret sauce that they want, and integrate it into the hardware level,” explained the CFO of Intel. “Anything that you can move from software to hardware, you can improve the performance and decrease the cost, sometimes by an order of magnitude. So you can make a huge improvement in cost and performance.”

It will be very interesting to see how Intel adjusts its research and development process in order to maintain costs and product cycles while offering highly-custom processors for its server clients.

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KitGuru Says: The ironic thing that Intel faces today is that the very reason why it became the dominant player on the server market (and why it could actually become a big player on the server market!) was the offering of industry-standard products with industry-standard infrastructure. Intel-based servers are still easy to build, easy to maintain and easy to fix. A major reason why Intel success’s formula no longer works at huge cloud datacentres is that nowadays the cost of power required to run a datacentre by far exceeds any additional expenses caused by custom hardware.

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Intel: Half of Xeon chips for cloud datacenters will be custom in 2015 https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/intel-half-of-xeon-processors-for-cloud-datacenters-will-be-custom-in-2015/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/intel-half-of-xeon-processors-for-cloud-datacenters-will-be-custom-in-2015/#respond Tue, 23 Dec 2014 12:45:09 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=227910 It is a well-known fact that owners of large datacenters, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp. and other, have very diverse requirements for servers and microprocessors inside their servers. In the recent years both Intel Corp. and AMD offered custom central processing units to large clients in order to meet their requirements. Moreover, next …

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It is a well-known fact that owners of large datacenters, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp. and other, have very diverse requirements for servers and microprocessors inside their servers. In the recent years both Intel Corp. and AMD offered custom central processing units to large clients in order to meet their requirements. Moreover, next year over half of chips Intel sells to big cloud service providers will be custom.

“We have never said no to a custom solution,” said Diane Bryant, the head of Intel’s data center business, reports NYTimes. “We get orders from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands of special chips.”

intel_xeon_e7_v2

Companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook need processors with reduced power consumption and sometimes special input/output capabilities to run hyper-scale datacenters efficiently. To provide competent solutions to such clients, Intel can customize its server platforms or processors themselves to support custom controllers, FPGAs or even memory solutions. At present Intel has 35 custom Xeon processors that belong to the Grantley platform. Such central processing units offer certain performance enhancements to match specific workloads.

“Companies like AWS are running a million servers, so floor space, power, cooling, people – you want to optimize everything,” said Ms. Bryant. “The name of the game is customization.”

However, such level of customization is only the beginning.

intel_xeon_standard_to_custom

Eventually Intel plans to include intellectual property of its customers into its standard microprocessors. For example, four of such features are already present in the latest-generation Xeon “Haswell-EP” processors and two more features are in development for upcoming chips.

The world’s largest chipmaker is also working on fully custom microprocessors that are designed and customized for particular clients. Such chips in many ways resemble AMD’s semi-custom microprocessors that contain IP from clients, custom I/O configuration and are specially configured for particular workloads. According to Intel, it has more than ten customers who would like to have fully custom CPUs that feature high-performance or low-power x86 cores.

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KitGuru Says: While we have no idea how custom Intel’s “full custom CPUs” are because in the majority of cases they have to fit into industry-standard sockets and support industry-standard memory (Micron’s hybrid memory cube is also a type of industry-standard memory, though). Nonetheless, if such chips incorporate a substantial amount of third-party IP and have special capabilities, they definitely fit into semi-custom category. As a result, it is evident that AMD’s semi-custom business approach perfectly works at Intel as well.

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