14 DAY TRIAL // Some years ago, Advanced Micro Devices decided to detach its products from the nickname of “Intel foils” and variations thereof. Part of the new direction was a focus on mainstream technology.
This meant that AMD no longer pushed forward all that fervently on the high-end central processing unit market.
Because of this, Intel has been more or less unchallenged on the top-end and extreme performance PC and workstation CPU market. Even AMD's 8-core A-Series APUs FX CPUs are matched with Core i5 CPUs instead of Core i7 or Xeon.
Of course, the processors are also efficient and reasonably cheap, so everything balances out. Still, it is time for a change according to the company CEO.
AMD will start investing heavily again in high-performance CPUs
During the conference call of AMD’s 2014 financial review, Advanced Micro Devices officials touched on several key points. High-end R&D investment was one of them.
However, the Sunnyvale, California-based corporation still seems reluctant to try its hand at powerful consumer chips. Instead, it wants to focus on embedded, enterprise and semi-custom segments.
“We will increase our R&D investments in enterprise, embedded and semi-custom,” said AMD CEO Lisa Su.
“AMD is the only company in the industry that can offer a full continuum of high performance standard and custom solutions, cementing both the ARM and x86 ecosystems and we must leverage this position to drive differentiated and innovative solutions for our customers.”
This means that enterprise server units of high-performance will finally start flowing again. Some of those might substitute well enough for desktop enthusiast CPUs, but we can't guarantee it.
Still, ultimately it's the server market where AMD will divert most of its free funds, despite the design cycle being longer there. For long-term revenue, it should serve the company well, especially with how important it is to increase margins after the rather painful financial results of 2014.
“Our server partners have increasingly told us they want to see AMD playing a much larger part in this business. Although the design cycle is longer, this is an important vector for long-term revenue and margin expansion and we are designing new x86 and ARM-based leadership products for this space, powered by our next-generation ARM and x86 cores,” the CEO said.
There is still hope for enthusiasts
Simply put, many high-end consumer chips deployed by Intel and AMD have been based on server designs. It is why they lack integrated graphics but have large cache and wide memory interfaces. Until we know more, we'll be rooting for the possibility from the sidelines.