Milan (Italy) - It is fair to say that Barcelona has not turned out the CPU core many hoped it would be and lots of people inside AMD would rather forget about this evolutionary step and quickly move on to the next architecture. Custom PC was able to squeeze some more information out of AMD about this next-gen architecture. It’s not much, but we now know for sure that it will be "completely different" from what AMD is selling today.
This confirmation comes from Giuseppe Amato, AMD’s technical director of sales & marketing for the EMEA region, one of the very few executives in the company who occasionally provide straight-forward answers.
"If I look at the next generation architecture of our CPU, then it will definitely not be, how can I say, comparable with the Phenom. It will look completely different," Custom PC quoted Amato. Of course, this does not really come as a surprise and was previously indicated. However, Amato also noted that the new architecture, which is expected to end up in the Bulldozer core, will "solve problems that today we think can never be addressed by hardware."
This comment is likely to fuel a new rumor mill and if it was up to us, we’d be betting the farm on addressing bandwidth challenges and simplify virtualization. We also believe that we could be seeing a GPU influence and AMD may be applying its Fusion LEGO concept to this new architecture - in order to apply massively parallel designs.
AMD would do well to introduce a brand new architecture, and not soon enough. The company has been losing market share to Intel over the last year, and much of what it gained during the Athlon days have been lost. AMD has also posted many consecutive losses in revenue in the order of billions of dollars. AMD recently announced a brand new initiative to produce and sell its own brand of computers. Company executives say that they have thought about it long and hard, and feel that it makes sense for AMD to introduce a business class group of computers with a guaranteed 24-months life cycle, something AMD says is a concern for most businesses.
