Processors Toolkit

AMD opens up chip design on two fronts

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Chip Design,
Processor,
AMD

John G. Spooner CNET News

Published: 21 Sep 2004 14:25 BST

Advanced Micro Devices' next major processor might come with a Boston accent.

The chipmaker this summer established a new chip design team at its Boston Design Centre here, a continent away from its Silicon Valley base, as part of a worldwide effort to strengthen its ability to deliver new processors and boost its sales.

The bulk of the new team, about 60 design engineers out of a total of 90, was already in the neighbourhood -- they were stationed at a nearby outpost of Sun Microsystems. The engineers, who came on board en masse in July, had been working on new processors for Sun, before the computer maker shifted its processor design strategy and cancelled two projects, including its UltraSparc V. Many of the designers also had worked on Digital Equipment's Alpha processor at one time or another, considered a good pedigree in the chip world.

AMD's customers, meanwhile, had been looking for "all kinds of variations" on the company's products, said David Rich, director of business development and customer support for AMD.

"We wanted to have more design groups," Rich said. "So we decided to make the Boston site a real [processor design] site because of the talent that's in the area."

AMD has been shining financially for the past few quarters, thanks to products such as its Opteron server chip, which can handle both 32-bit and 64-bit instructions, and has begun plowing more development resources back into its processor business. The chipmaker now has five PC and server processor design teams of varying sizes. A sixth team works on non-PC chips, such as the Geode for set-top boxes and industrial handhelds.

The three newest teams were all established this summer, including the engineers in Boxborough, a smaller group at the company's India Engineering Centre in Bangalore and a team focusing on mobile processors at the AMD Japan Engineering Lab in Tokyo. Their efforts are being coupled with work done by existing design groups at the company's headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, and in Austin, Texas. AMD is out to create a variety of new chips to help it boost revenue and profit, and gain a larger portion of the PC processor market away from rival Intel.

In their first few weeks at AMD, new members of the Massachusetts-based team were occupied primarily with getting up-to-speed on working for the company, through projects such as creating and joining in university-like classes on chip design -- Sun and AMD's chips use two different architectures. They also did team building through activities such as constructing and launching model rockets.

Now they're ready to get down to business, Rich said.

"The people that were here already have lots of experience, and the people we've hired -- it's not like these guys were new grads that went to Sun -- a lot of them had previous experience before that," Rich said.

AMD aims to take advantage of local talent in a similar manner in Bangalore, where it hopes to have a team of 40 engineers in place by the end of this year.

Multicore competencies
The Massachusetts team has expertise in several areas, including multicore chips, which pack two or more processor cores into a single piece of silicon, and low-power processors that make them ideal for notebook PCs and servers. Both are product areas that AMD considers important for its growth.

For example, AMD plans to start offering dual-core processors for workstations and servers in mid-2005. It recently demonstrated a dual-core Opteron chip running in a Hewlett-Packard server. Dual-core chips for PCs, due later in 2005, will become AMD's main products over time.

The move to add enhance its processor design efforts is a good sign for AMD, which until now has essentially worked on one processor at a time, according to Kevin Krewell, editor in chief of the Microprocessor Report.

"I think what this means is that AMD now has the critical mass of design talent to do more than just one [processor)] core at a time," Krewell said. "Now it has enough capability to run two fully independent teams to deliver two products at the same time."

Krewell predicts that AMD will focus its newfound talent on chips for notebooks and servers.

"Desktop parts could pretty much fall out from designs, from either mobile (processors) or servers, at this point," he said. "Notebooks are a growing segment of the corporate and home marketplace, and servers are where the [high] average selling prices are -- the dollars AMD needs to get a steady revenue stream."

AMD is also working on adding more features to its chips to improve computers' performance or make them more secure. One, code-named Pacifica, is intended to help processors work well with software intended for virtualisation, or partitioning a computer to help it run different programs simultaneously. Another, code-named Presidio, is focused on security.

"With both security and virtualisation, it's not really a software thing or a hardware thing [anymore]," said Margaret Lewis, AMD's commercial software strategist. "Instead, what you're seeing is the conjoining of hardware and software."