My only question is now do people believe me that AMD will NOT be making GPUs ANYTIME SOON?
You're always spankin' yerself all over this forum about how your predictions come true. So lay it out in clear terms. Tell us, OGO, and tell us EXACTLY how the AMD/ATI evolution will unfold. Tell us what products to expect, when to expect them, and most importantly, project the effects these devices will have on the industry. Be specific. I already made a related prediction - that they are looking to design an integrated system for mobile devices. To be more specific, I'd guess that they are looking to design a laptop chipset/CPU/GPU that are integrated to improve power management and performance by changing somewhat the roles of CPU and GPU. I expect to see a retail product by ~late 2008. The effect on the industry will be significant although evolutionary. Significant because it will allow AMD/ATI to expand market share in the laptop arena. Evolutionary because I don't expect the power savings to be shocking - although I hope to be proved wrong on this point.
That prediction is far from revolutionary and I admit to copping parts of it from various industry sources. My point is to give you an example of the minimum level of specificity required before you can claim that one of your predictions is meaningful. To extrapolate the above, I expect to see AMD/ATI to apply their new integrated arch to other areas, both in the compact mobile arena and to desktop systems. CPUs and GPUs that use less energy are clearly the way of the future and designers that don't give due emphasis will be looking for work within a decade. I'm hoping that AMD/ATI can do something fantastic that will change high performance systems, such as servers, workstations, 3-D systems, etc., because if they are successful, I expect Intel to bring about other excellent products.
OK, if you insist.
Q406 - deal should close and at least the MorganStanley money will be delivered to ATi board.
Q1 07 - AMD recieves first monthly income from ATi. AMD begins to make space for chipsets in Fab36. ATi division signs new deal with Dell. AMD announces new chipset to ship around Q3 for 16Way K8L.
Q2 07 - AMD starts shipping chipsets for revenue (not IGPs). AMD signs a new deal with HP/Lenovo. AMDs volume shipments jump 30% from the last year. Will likely have > 27% worldwide share. (dependng on volume shipped by Dell) 4x4 is announced to go quad core by end of Q3. AMD gets at least 2 months of ATi profits.
Q307 - AMD announces first Torrenza part, probably a mocked up x1600 as a PPU. Aegia signs on for Torrenza and gets 20X the processing power in a smaller package. Lawsuit comes to a head. (no comment) Sun announces second Torrenza part (K8L is needed for native recognition), probably Java accelerator. Socket merge with Sparc and Opteron about to be released. ALL AMD chips get L3.
Q407 - ATi announces modular GPU with virtualization (expected to serve at least 10 1280x1024 desktops under VM). ATi announces new FireGL with Torrenza support. Several more coProcs are released for scientific and visualization apps. AMD has 32% share.
Q108 - AMD releases first complete modular system in prep for Raiden.
Q208 - AMD remains around 32-40% forever.
Q308 - AMD intros HW threads. "New Gen" core reported to have 8 cores and 2 threads per core @ 45nm. Desktops get quad K8L and Bulldozer moves to midrange desktop. 8 core FX announced.
Cautionary statement:
This is just for fun. It may be right it may not be. Feel free to comment.
Fail. i killed raiden in MGS2