AMD Announces "From Scratch" Next Generation High-Performance x86 & ARM Cores

[TechFan@ic]

Chinese sources have indicated that AMD has been working on an all new from the ground-up high-performance core for two years now led by Jim Keller the engineer behind the original Athlon XP & Athlon 64.
This new architecture is supposedly going back to AMD's traditional multi-core approach with no modularity or resource sharing.
The new core is set to follow Excavator which will be released next year.

Sources : 1 2 3

UPDATE :
The Chinese sources unanimously referenced "wall street" as their source, conveniently an interview with AMD's CEO Rory Read has just been published on WSJ.
 

WSJ: Let’s talk a little about server, where your share of the market–

Read: –Has gotten much smaller.

WSJ:  Has gotten really small. Are you giving up on x86 server chips?

Read: No. So let’s be perfectly clear on that. I think that Bulldozer (AMD’s recent processor design) wasn’t the game-changer that people had thought it would be.

We went out and got world-class designers and world-class leaders like Jim Keller or Raja Koduri that came over from Apple.

They’re working on next generation work in that space, in the server space, in the cores space. And that’s going to be both ARM- and x86-based.

Interestingly enough AMD's (and Intel's) high performance cores are always designed for servers. Both Bulldozer & Piledriver were engineered specifically with servers in mind. So it seems AMD's CEO has inadvertently reaffirmed the rumors floating around.

UPDATE 2 : This has been officially confirmed and is no longer a rumor. AMD is working on a new "from scratch" x86 high performance core along with a "sister" ARM core dubbed K12.

Jim Keller talking about K12 and "next-gen" x86 core @ AMD's Core Innovation Summit May 2014.

You can watch the full one and a half hour event here.

[JAKEBAB]

Sounds interesting i hope its not like bulldozer or whatever how it was so hyped it was the first "8 core" etc and there using the old FX name then didn't deliver. 

 

P.S About time AMD!

[bbqsauce]

i opened the chinese link and saw the picture and i thought it was a troll. lol

[beebskadoo]

I thought the rumors mainly stated that AMD will be leaving the performance x86 market in favor of mobile and consumer grade parts? If this is true, it'll sure be interesting (I hope)

[Kamina]

I honestly thought the module approach had great potential. I guess they couldn't figure out a way to increase IPC while sharing resources. The whole point of the FX line was to increase parallelism, so we'll just have to wait and see what AMD will do with their new architecture. CMT over hyperthreading would have had a nice future if done right.

[kuddlesworth9419]

Finally something can could actually be interesting. Let's face it APU's are not interesting. High performance CPU's are.

[bbqsauce]

Finally something can could actually be interesting. Let's face it APU's are not interesting. High performance CPU's are.

what about high performance APUs? Probably won't exist, but hey. 

[Constantine]

Hopefully my i5 can last the next 2 years for this architecture and HOPEFULLY its not a big disappointment like Bulldozer.

 

Finally something can could actually be interesting. Let's face it APU's are not interesting. High performance CPU's are.

 

TBH, I'm still interested in APUs. If they can make it perform as a computational FPU core instead of a GPU then I can see it performing really well. At the moment, the instruction sets for it are just a cpu and a gpu in a single package. 

[Opcode]

Even tho its just rumors, for some reason I believe it.

[TacticlTwinkie]

Hmmm, it seems like my suspicions might be right. I had a gut feeling AMD would make some sort of move in the high end cpu market in 2015 (probably q3-q4), whether it be an announcement or even a release. They have to have had a team working on it and had to have something, at least on paper. Now it's a waiting game to see if it's up to snuff.

[pixeldensity]

well hopefully they do bring the big guns out. Maybe they may announce it at their Core Innovation press event. Fingers crossed

[Bonn]

mmmm old athlons.

[coreRoss]

I'm thinking of building a new computer next year. So this might be to late for me. But great news if AMD can do it.

[greenroost1445]

Dear God I hope it's true

[Eroda]

well 4 high performance cores coupled with their GPU seems smarter. 

[pbenologa]

Finally something can could actually be interesting. Let's face it APU's are not interesting. High performance CPU's are.

I think if they could put a R9 series graphics on the APU then it will be a big thing. Then fix the dual graphics setup. or maybe i'm daydreaming again LOL

[Misanthrope]

I don't think they will be completely abandoning the APU market, after all they are the sole supplier of console APU's right now and they recently made some strides into mobiles so they should continue at least some R&D for APUs. However more direct (and meaningful) competition to intel is always welcome to keep both parties honest.

[Opcode]

Finally something can could actually be interesting. Let's face it APU's are not interesting. High performance CPU's are.

APU's are interesting as we move into the future of GPGPU. You call any processor with good core performance a "high performance CPU" when in reality APU's are more "high performance" (the A10-7850k is at minimum 3x faster than the FX-8350). It's all about how you choose to utilize it. HSA is still fairly new, and it's still being adopted by software developers. Hardware has adapted to become over 300% faster, the problem is software needs to catch up. So AMD's APU line? Yeah, that's not going anywhere. The next step for AMD is taking their enthusiast line, and their APU line and smashing them together. Full desktop cores (with L3) with the addition of a iGPU would be AMD's next best move in the market.

[kuddlesworth9419]

what about high performance APUs? Probably won't exist, but hey. 

Games don't utilize APU's to their full extent which is why I don't like APU's. For gaming it's just better to have a strong CPU and a strong GPU. Having a weak CPU and a strongish GPU is a bad idea. APU's are not very good CPU's but are ok GPU's that is the problem. Try and play any CPU intensive game example Planetside 2) and tell me that APU's are a good idea. I have an i7 2600 and my CPU is a bottleneck in that game with a 680. I get frame rate below 60 in intensive scenarios. 

[Humbug]

Guys the term 'high performance core' does not mean that it will not be an APU.

In fact I hope it's an APU because that's the direction in which AMD wants to take the industry with HSA.

As long as the pure CPU performance is also strong (unlike current AMD APUs) then we have nothing to complain about...

[Eroda]

high performance core means just that each core will be stronger , ie the CPU portion of their APU will be more powerful  because they have intel beat in integrated graphics if they can close the gap with their CPU performance then its a no brainer

[onionring]

high performance core means just that each core will be stronger , ie the CPU portion of their APU will be more powerful because they have intel beat in integrated graphics if they can close the gap with their CPU performance then its a no brainer

it could also only mean that they will stop sharing part of the cores to other core (to be like intel) and that s it.

personnally i d be totally fine if they only made consumer dual socket boards and make the 2 cpus act like one.

[TechFan@ic]

APU's are interesting as we move into the future of GPGPU. You call any processor with good core performance a "high performance CPU" when in reality APU's are more "high performance" (the A10-7850k is at minimum 3x faster than the FX-8350). It's all about how you choose to utilize it. HSA is still fairly new, and it's still being adopted by software developers. Hardware has adapted to become over 300% faster, the problem is software needs to catch up. So AMD's APU line? Yeah, that's not going anywhere. The next step for AMD is taking their enthusiast line, and their APU line and smashing them together. Full desktop cores (with L3) with the addition of a iGPU would be AMD's next best move in the market.

AMD's plan is to replace L3 SRAM with stacked DRAM, which results in a much smaller die size, greatly increased cache size & total bandwidth.

[Opcode]

AMD's plan is to replace L3 SRAM with stacked DRAM, which results in a much smaller die size, greatly increased cache size & total bandwidth.

If AMD can get enough of it on the die dedicated for the iGPU, then they really got something on their hands. Not only will they remove the bottleneck of poor system memory bandwidth, but also greatly reduce the latency. If the A10-7850k had something like this, it would actually be faster than the discrete HD 7750's.

[TechFan@ic]

If AMD can get enough of it on the die dedicated for the iGPU, then they really got something on their hands. Not only will they remove the bottleneck of poor system memory bandwidth, but also greatly reduce the latency. If the A10-7850k had something like this, it would actually be faster than the discrete HD 7750's.

For the APU to be HSA compatible the L3 pool of stacked HBM will have to be shared between the CPU cores & the GPU.

AMD's Bryan Black went into great detail in HotChips 24 on how they're going to stack HBM and basically all parts of the SOC and what benefits they expect.