AMD’s Desktop Lineup Rumoured To Exclude Piledriver
Rumour has it that AMD may be skipping the desktop release of “Piledriver” processors, codenamed Vishera. Abandoning the importance the company has placed parallel computing core-count stance for the desktop market, AMD has decided against the release of Piledriver chips to the desktop market due to the per core performance not being a large enough increase over existing Bulldozer chips to justify a new product release, which is a costly affair. Instead, AMD will be focusing on the release of its 28 nm “Steamroller” architecture in early 2013.
While Piledriver may introduce a small single-threaded performance increase over existing Bulldozer CPUs, it is not enough to improve their position against Intel. Most home-users don’t need the masses of multi-threaded performance offered by a large core count as the majority of everyday tasks are still single-threaded, and there are very few games which can make use of more than four threads. The people buying into the desktop market for heavy multi-threaded performance do not amount to enough to make the core race as profitable as raw performance-per-core, and enterprises look towards the server market (namely Opteron and Xeon processors).
This is not necessarily the case in the server market, and it would appear that AMD will push for the release of their Opteron “Abu Dhabi” 16-core processors. Much like Magny Cours, Abu Dhabi will feature two processor dies in one package, this time with eight cores (as opposed to Magny Cours’ six) per die.
This may be a smart move from a business standpoint as unless the performance increase is large enough to warrant an upgrade, existing Bulldozer customers will skip Piledriver. However, this puts much greater pressure on AMD to make Steamroller a success, as should it fail their saving grace may only appear much later with “Excavator”. The future for AMD’s “Trinity” APUs is unclear at present. Source — VR-Zone
