…to have two designs. It's easier just to have a single design that has all the high-end features in it, because you only have to validate one thing.
Are you looking at more than eight-processor machines?
This time next year, we will have a quad-core [chip], so an eight-processor system will be a 32-processor system. Probably 99.5 percent of all the servers in the world could be met by a machine of that capacity. We know how to do a glue-less eight-socket system. We think, for at least the next couple of years, that is where the opportunity is.
If you look at the AMD-Intel race in the last few years, two factors played a big part: the changes at AMD, and Intel made a lot of mistakes — it did not, let's say, have the best chip in the world. Now it has a new family of chips that is getting good benchmarks. Is it going to get tougher for AMD to grow in the next couple of years?
In a healthy, fair and open environment with two strong competitors, you ought to be at a point where the products really compete with each other.
We had a period of time where it [Intel] just screwed up. I mean, I don't know how else to say it. It has finally responded to what we did roughly two or three years ago, but we have our next generation coming out.
As long as there's a fair and open competition, it's a horse race between the two companies. And when we talked to the tier-1 [customers], that's what they want.
When I talk to customers, there are usually four or five different criteria that they use. Price is certainly one of them; performance is another one. What sort of innovation they can do in the platform is another.
Dell and IBM are probably good examples of companies that you know for sure are both our future roadmaps and Intel's, and they both chose to go with us for a broader and broader set of products. So, the way I read all that is we're doing the right thing across the board. It's not just performance; it's not just pricing.
Intel is going to continue to be aggressive. We're not at all confused about that, but we think we have the right design points.
Another thing that comes up a lot is that AMD is talking a lot about incremental improvements for the basic architecture. Some people say that Intel plans to change architectures much faster and that AMD could fall behind technologically.
So what Intel is doing in my opinion is fixing a screw-up. If you look at the microarchitecture of the Core stuff, it looks a lot more like Pentium III. NetBurst [the underlying architecture of the Pentium 4] went off the deep end in terms of deep pipelining. It's a bad machine organisation.
So they've had to go back and fix things that we never broke. There is nothing fundamentally broken with our core, and Intel is in a different position with NetBurst. That core was fundamentally broken, so [Intel] had to fundamentally change it. And we never really went down that path. We went down a different path and said there's a balance between clock rate and parallelism.
There are certainly incremental changes you can make in the core, but the core itself is generally correct
With that in mind, how does the ATI acquisition contribute to that?
What's very interesting to us about the ATI acquisition is that now we can really make the right set of optimisations without artificial boundaries. There's a war right now between the CPU [central processing unit] and the GPU [graphics processing unit] guys, and to be honest, it's a bit of an artificial war. So a better approach is to be able to handle that stuff together where you can make the right trade-offs. If we need to move silicon between the CPU and the GPU, we can do that now.
Are there changes that you're planning to make to the core for the mobile space?
One of the areas we need to work on as a company is the mobile space. And that's where the biggest win comes, from being able to integrate the graphics.
Integration in the microprocessor itself or integration in the chipset?
Integration of the CPU and the GPU. Assuming the transaction closes on time, we would target a merged design in the 45nanometre time frame.
Which is 2008?
Yeah. Another thing happening in the graphics space is that there's more and more programmability. It used to be that it was just polygon rendering. That's what graphics was, but now developers are doing so much programming.
The next generation of gaming is really making things more dynamic. It's not making the surface look realistic, but making it behave realistically. We've crossed the point where the GPU can do real programs of a significant size.
It may seem like 2008 is a long way away, but that's a major design cycle. ATI also has very good business, in the handset and set-top box DTV area.
Are you looking at x86 in phones?
Yeah, absolutely. In high-end, high-function phones, it's driven by software. If you look at what's out there today, there's a number of embedded RISC [reduced instruction set computing] processors that are all fine. But as the software stack gets more complex, people want potentially to run the same applications.
Mobile phones have been such a tough sell though. Intel landed the deal for the latest BlackBerry, but it's a rarity.
Again, if you look at the processor architectures out there, there's a whole host of them. There's Power PC, Hitachi. What that says to me is today is not the right time to try to bring in an all-purpose architecture to that space. It's not needed yet. But as the software stack gets more and more complex, the software development environment becomes a bigger deal. Then the x86 is a good match.
CNET News.com's Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.
