In his previous business incarnations, Phil Hester spent more than two decades at IBM, then founded a server manufacturer called Newisys. But as the (relatively) new chief technology officer at AMD, that impressive resume is likely to be put to the test.
Appointed in September, Hester is taking on full force the future of AMD's processor designs. He replaced Fred Weber, a man who many credit with the development of AMD's Opteron chip, a key piece in the Sunnyvale, California-based chipmaker's turnaround.
ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com recently spoke with Hester about AMD's plan to offer quad-core processors by 2007; migrate to DDR2 RAM; and his vision of the next generation of Opteron and Athlon processors, including building the company's ecosystem by licensing its technology.
Is it true that AMD is looking at licensing parts of its architecture?
The idea has been around for a while but it relates to understanding what our direct customers and the end customers want to do. The idea is to selectively license the coherent HyperTransport technology [a chip-to-chip interconnect supported by AMD and primarily used on a computer system board in distances up to 61cm].
Isn't this the technology that you have been promoting for years as a better alternative to Intel's front-side bus systems or its upcoming Common System Interconnect?
Exactly.
And you're going to license that to other people?
Right. So the example I'd give you is in the high-performance tactical computing area, where people like Cray and others would like to do vector floating-point units.
Being able to do that requires a co-processor, or attached processor elements that would attach into a standard system. We don't have any finalised plans yet, but if you look at the workloads in the data centre, you're starting to see applications where, if you could accelerate XML and Java, a number of the vertical applications would perform significantly better. So instead of trying to build a machine that's just aimed at workloads, you can think about the attached processor or co-processor that works in conjunction with our AMD64 architecture to accelerate those workloads.
Can you paint a picture of how it would look on the motherboard?
The simplest way to think about it is to build an eight-way symmetric multiprocessor system based on AMD64 processors such as Opteron. Think about the ability to replace one of those with a specialised engine. This chip is really aimed at running a specific workload like vector floating-point or XML or Java.
Is that technique possible today without letting that partner have knowledge of how AMD uses HyperTransport?
No, you would have to have detailed knowledge in the form of a licence for the coherent HyperTransport.
How is this going to be a good competitive advantage for AMD's strategy?
This is the concept of a friendly ecosystem that today, if you want to go build a specialised system, you really have to build all of it. Instead of ...
