Is AMD Puma relevant in a 45nm world?
 Patrick Moorhead, vice president of Advanced Marketing at AMD. So if the Puma platform is any indiction, the Next Big Thing which the Advanced Marketing department foresaw should surely be all about high-definition videos and 3D imaging. Raw number-crunching performance is going out of fashion like the arms race of the 1980s, with immersive 3D computing the new keyword. We spoke to Moorhead on why consumers should consider Puma despite the fact that AMD is still stuck in the 65nm era while its competitor has already gone the 45nm route. Advanced Marketing is an unusual title. Can you elaborate on what this involves and how it’s different from the usual marketing functions?Moorhead: In Advanced Marketing, what we do is work with different companies, focus groups and do market research to figure out what the next big thing is going to be. The next big thing is typically defined by a customer’s pain point which we can solve, or what I prefer to call pleasure point, and how people can have more fun while keeping up productivity. What I do is to put these concerns down in terms of silicon and hardware. In a nutshell, why should consumers choose Puma over other offerings in the market?Moorhead: The biggest challenge in the future is going to be that once people get comfortable with video, they will want it on every device, whether it's on their BlackBerrys or iPhones. Then you have the challenge of storage and codec formats, of which there are about 16 different formats you need to convert from. People are going to be looking for an easy way to move their video content from their PC to their mobile devices, shrinking it down from a 20GB footprint to about 300MB. That is just a huge pain point for users today, and I am not even going to mention DRM (digital right management)-protected material. 3D and video are where we are heading with the Puma platform. The reason I don’t say games and video is because 3D is being used for so many other things now. We have tripled the 3D performance compared with the prior platform (Kite Refresh), which is great for games but also for new things people are downloading, such as 3D browsers (E.g. Spacetime)and Google Earth. For high-definition video, the decoding is actually done on the chipset as opposed to the processor. The benefit is twofold. If you are decoding on the chipset, you have processor cycles available for other programs like Windows Defender, etc. As you are watching Blu-ray with the Puma system, you get full 30fps with no hiccups even if something is happening in the background, unlike with the Intel system. The other benefit is from a battery life perspective. Historically, you cannot watch a full-HD movie on a single battery charge. But with Puma, you can. So instead of having your processor at 75 to 80 percent while decoding, it’s down to 20 percent utilization. While your competitor is offering 45nm chips, your latest processor is still stuck in the 65nm era. Does this put AMD far behind technologically, or is it just a matter of perspective?Moorhead: First of all, nobody buys a system based on how many nanometers. What they care about is the performance it can deliver in a certain thermal envelope and how reliable it is. Our competitor has done an interesting job of convincing people that different pieces (of the hardware) matter. At the end of the day, all customers care about is what technology can deliver to them. Our chips do not require as much memory as they have an integrated memory controller and hence less latency. You can say that this requires our competitors to be one step ahead in processor technology to be competitive with our stuff. It’s funny that for the past eight years we have gone back and forth as to who has the performance crown. Now it is actually a much more complex equation than it used to be, particularly when you have different levels of power, price/performance per watt as opposed to just raw performance. That’s why if you really talk to end-users, for the most part they care mainly about what this machine can deliver to them, the brand or technology rather than the provider of the chip. We’re actually leveraging a lot on what consumers are thinking about when we were designing Puma (for video), as people are getting more attuned to the quality of video due to the explosion of high-definition LCD TVs. WiMAX or HSDPA, which wireless technology will AMD be gunning for?Moorhead: Our platforms are going to be fully compatible with whatever comes out. We work with all the 3G vendors and we’re not trying to lock anyone into a certain standard. As you have probably seen and know, there are many challenges involved in trying to own a wireless service. Our customers and OEMs appreciate that we work with Atheros, RaLink, Qualcomm, etc. |
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