"AMD has been a customer-centric innovation company for a long time. Essentially we build products that solve customers' day-to-day real problem," said Tan See Ghee, AMD's South Asia technology director, in a media briefing held here Thursday.
Tan highlighted four design goals centered around its customers' feedback.
The first goal was to have a consistent platform and roadmap. "This was the first thing that we heard from them (customers)," Tan said, noting that manufacturers today cannot afford to introduce new products without planning for the future.
"You have to worry about the platform and also the roadmap that will bring [you] from the current [product] to tomorrow's product," he said. "So, what we have done from a design goal was to minimize the backend changes and the transition costs, and have processors that will provide a very clear migration path."
The second goal was to ensure seamless upgradeability. AMD's customers did not want to go through a "very disruptive upgrading path", which would include having to change to a new chipset or vendor.
Tan explained that these changes "will give rise to higher costs", and more importantly, pose support problems. "Today, the IT personnel may be very familiar with a certain platform or a certain chipset, [but] if they have to migrate to a new platform entirely, this will give rise to...support costs," he explained.
The third design goal related to power and thermals. "We listened to customers by offering a next-generation product at the same, if not lower, power than the current generation," Tan said.
"This becomes a very clear and immediate advantage, because you expect the next-generation product to [have] better performance," he said. "If [it] can be maintained at the same power or a lower power [level], obviously, you'll be able to do more work for less [power]."
AMD customers also wanted a fully scalable product with no bottlenecks. "[This is] because today, when you design a product, be it a server or desktop, it's very important to look at the scalability, [and] also whether there are bottlenecks in the systems," he said.
"There's no point having very fast building blocks in a certain segment, [while] the rest of the system has a bottleneck [due to] some limitations in the system design," Tan added.
After months of speculation, AMD announced that it would start selling its Barcelona quad-core chips in August this year, confirming rumors of a delay.
The first models will be available in standard and low-power versions, and will run at clock frequencies of up to 2GHz, while higher-power version will only be out in the fourth quarter of this year. The first servers using the Barcelona chips will start shipping in September.
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C'mon ZDNet Asia, you call this journalism? This article is making you the laughing stock on the Internet...
Posted by Hector Ruiz on Saturday, July 07 2007 12:24 PM