AMD Talks About APU Commitment at Computex 2013

AMD's Lisa Su took the stage at Computex 2013 to talk about what the chipmaker has in store for the foreseeable future. Su starts off expressing AMD's commitment and confidence in the APU, and how it set a trend for some other competing chipmaker to devote more die space to graphics, in what she believes to be the future of computing for the next decade.

Su also said that APUs lend themselves to new form factors and alternative computing. The new inclusion of AMD APUs inside the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are touted as validations of AMD's technology.

 

Also confirmed was the company's 2013 roadmap, with Kaveri bring pegged for later this year on a 28nm process. "The message from AMD is that our product portfolio is strong and that we're executing very, very well to our products," said Su.

The AMD SVP also discussed the shift from notebook demand to tablets and other media consumption devices, and how AMD wants to focus on this growing segment.

Our international team was at the AMD press conference at Computex and record it for your viewing enjoyment. Check it out below:

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
  • sarinaide
    Fantastic period for AMD, execution and product line is important and the line up is quite aggressive allowing end users to be spoiled for choices, very exciting time and a bit of a rebirth.
    Reply
  • Benthon
    I see the current situation in the market to be something like this.. Intel basically won the "biggest, bestest, most efficient CPU" race. Except AMD walked out of the race halfway through and decided to participate in the "APU" race. By the time Intel finished the CPU race, nobody was there at the finish line to congratulate them because the market shift to APU's is already starting to happen.
    I'm a huge fan of Intel in my desktop (with Haswell being meh), but honestly the integrated graphics in Richland with 2133MHZ RAM and the upcoming Kaveri are sick and Intel really isn't even close. Now they're playing catch up and I bet they don't like it.
    Reply
  • silverblue
    Well... they are, but they charge through the nose for Iris Pro. I'm sure AMD could devise an APU with L4 cache if they really wanted to show Intel up but I'd rather they just get Kaveri here as soon as possible.
    Reply
  • somebodyspecial
    Kaveri would be impressive if 20nm this year, not 28nm.
    It's difficult to add embedded ram without blowing up cost (they already lose money on every cpu sale, that's how you rack up 1.18B in losses when the gpu side barely breaks even - you're being killed on cpu sales), where Intel offsets some with 22nm saving die cost. AMD will have a tough time with Broadwell which again will concentrate on gpu perf and leave us CPU people at 10-15% if lucky. I'd expect broadwell to double that cache to 256mb or something else that will dramatically up perf. They can afford it unlike AMD. At 14nm they will have plenty of room to play with gpu. If they released iris to the desktop A10-6800 wouldn't make a cent. They will do this move next time though, as Arm will be in their cpu space on all fronts by then (notebook, server, desktop) so they will be able to legally kill AMD with FCC coming to get them.
    You could argue they could pull this now, but I think they'll just wait until they KNOW the FCC won't come for them at 14nm. By then Arm will be selling desktops, notebooks etc with chrome, firefoxos, etc and of course servers with all the Arm chips coming there too (Project Boulder etc, cavium etc, everyone planning arm server chips). If there are 6-7 cpu competitors, Intel can kill AMD and get it over with.
    Reply
  • neilquan
    @Somebodyspecial Lets hope that doesnt happen. Afterall, its competition that pushes these companies to bring out better products. Without it wed be enslaved to whatever timetable they felt like releasing something new with only mild upgrades.
    Reply
  • danwat1234
    45w mobile APUs? 45w CPUs for those you will have a dedicated GPU, so we can have decent single core performance?
    Reply
  • sarinaide
    The big issue and why AMD had losses was because traditional markets were all AMD catered for, cue 2013 and AMD have products in every market sector with Tamash and Kabini being fantastic for what they are intended to do, Richland is by far the best iGPU solution on a cost to performance basis and is considerably smoother than HD4600 and is another evolutionary step of the APU. Rory Reed took a ton of criticism but despite the difficult 18 months AMD had upfront things are looking a lot better and most is down to having a product line.
    Reply