Custom and embedded chips will be a focus as well

Oct 10, 2014 06:21 GMT  ·  By

AMD's sudden change of chief executive officers came as something of a boot to the head the other day, since there hadn't been any indication that it was going to happen. Now, though, we at least know some of what the company will try to do under the new leadership.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company really didn't provide any sort of hint that Rory P. Read would be leaving the company any time soon.

Admittedly, he's staying as an advisor, but only until the end of the year, and he's already relinquished not only the CEO post but also his membership in the board of directors. Which is to say, he not only stopped being president of the board but left it completely.

Quite a sudden change considering that he's actually been successful in turning AMD around and even freeing it from immediate association (and comparison) to Intel. It would have been enough to assume he'd stay with AMD for a few good years.

Alas, in the end, it appears he really did join AMD only to clean house and get things started in a new direction. Now, the new CEO is former chief operating officer Lisa Su.

What AMD intends to do now

According to some transcripts of in-house interviews published by Fudzilla and VentureBeat, AMD will start by launching Radeon graphics processing units (GPUs) based on the 20nm manufacturing technology. K11 and K12 processors should arrive at the same time as well.

Which brings us to the second big goal: timing. The company intends to release products “on time” from now on.

This is a suggestion (and admittance) that Advanced Micro Devices hasn't really managed to follow its internal roadmap very well until now.

Considering that the latest Phenom central processing units arrived a bit late on the market, that seems to be the case. That low-end Kaveri APUs are still unavailable in some areas of the world is another indicator that AMD hasn't been capable of releasing products completely on time.

At least the successors to the Radeon R9 290/280 cards have an excuse: AMD didn't (apparently) want to compromise like NVIDIA did and redesign the architecture for the same 28nm fabrication node it's using now. The Pirate Islands, Zen, Nolan, Amur and Carrizo products won't have this excuse though.

The new AMD roadmap

We don't actually know it unfortunately, provided AMD even changed it. We know that the 20nm Faraway GPU is supposed to debut next year, but the ETAs for everything else are still in flux. Some emphasis on embedded and custom chips can be expected as well, with both x86 and ARM architectures getting attention.