AMD: Kaveri is Still a Go
AMD is at the beginning of a massive reorganization phase that will only leave about half of its entire business to traditional processors.
The company recently denied rumors that it has shelved plans for its next big APU, Kaveri.
In addition to speculation that the company is up for sale, AMD is also being hit by product cancellation rumors. The most recent rumor targeted its mainstream desktop APU line, which claimed that the current Piledriver will be AMD's last major core. The Steamroller core, which has been rumored to come with some innovative features such as native acceleration for web apps running in browser windows, would be canceled due to the effects of the layoffs at the company, resulting in AMD nixing the Kaveri APU, as well as the Excavator chip.
AMD denied this report and stated that the core as well as Kaveri are still in development. So far, this claim makes sense to us, since AMD is still a CPU company and its competitiveness will rely on product innovation in one way or the other. In a recent conference call, CEO Rory Read conceded that the company will scale back its traditional CPU business and put greater focus on micro servers, "semi-custom" APUs for the gaming, industrial and communications market, as well as APUs for tablets.
That said, microprocessor innovation is still the life blood of the company and it would be tough for the company to try to live off Piledriver until it has gained substantial traction in the tablet market.
Long-story short, you won't be able to change your CPU without changing the motherboard; Motherboard comes with CPU the embedded, much like the Atom.
Likely this one: Link
Likely this one: Link
You mean ATI's gpu's? the ones that are keeping AMD in business?
If we had to give up ATI, I wish we could have gotten a more competitive AMD out of it. Instead, they have gone back to hanging on by their fingernails.
Long-story short, you won't be able to change your CPU without changing the motherboard; Motherboard comes with CPU the embedded, much like the Atom.
I believe it was something about Intel making only embedded CPU's.
Edit- Haha. I post a reply to Reaper_17's comment and there are 5 other comment that appear that answer reaper's question.
not falling for 'official satements' again.
Companies buying each other up, which results in cost cutting in a few ways.
Integration of components onto a single chip. i.e. the CPU/GPU/memory controller/chipset being all in one package. This is why AMD bought ATI. It's a race that Intel thinks they are winning, but there's more to building an APU than just fast CPU. AMD has proven that, but they are behind in process technology.
Intel plans to solder future CPU/GPU (GPGPU/APU) directly to the motherboard. This means no upgrades for enthusiasts without purchasing an entirely new motherboard. However, this soldering also makes the entire package cheaper as there is no inclusion of pins, etc. This can be good and bad, and in a way it is inevitable as thinks shrink.
However, is this the right time? The other companies involved will surely be losing out (i.e. those who make CPU coolers, etc) and the industry/consumers as a whole could reject this idea. The question then becomes can AMD offer APUs that are not soldered to the motherboard that can compete with Intel's soldered chips.
They are called AMD GPUs and graphics cards nowadays. Ati isn't used anymore except for the Radeon 5000 series and older. 6000 and 7000 are AMD, not Ati. Besides, they're beating Nvidia in performance and performance per dollar overall right noe, especially in future-resistance, so I don't see why you have such a seemingly condescending tone about them.
Also ATI is long long gone and the graphics does not keep AMD afloat (18 millions income in Q3 is nothing in comparison to net 131 million loss).
As I recall, it was 18M in profit, not income. That's not a net loss at the time, granted I think they may be headed for a net loss next time around, although the supposedly promising Black Friday sales might have helped deter that.
Micro-servers: Is that a drobo or something? Or a blade? How does AMD excel in this market?
Gaming devices: XBOX 720 GPU - check. PS4 GPU - check (I think?). Wii U - who cares? AMD owns parts of this, for now.
Industrial (embedded) solutions: if this is for imaging technologies such as MRI, then with GCN that makes a lot of sense. But this is not a huge market and cannot support a company as large as AMD without shared use of work products. They can only be successful with this if they develop the technology first for something else, and then re-apply it here.
Communications: smartphones? They're behind, and falling further behind. They need to find a manuf that can provide competitive power consumption levels.
Tablet APUs: Also falling behind, except for Windows 8 (non-RT) tablet applications. They need to find a manuf that can provide competitive power consumption levels.
I'm actually notebook shopping and I'm leaning towards their APU rather than Intel stuff. The notebook doesn't need to have raw compute speed so I'll give up some CPU horsepower to have some of that AMD integ graphics instead of the Intel HD4000 weak sauce.