AMD’s New Fusion APU’s on 32nm SOI
Posted date : Jan 13, 2011

The AMD PR folks are calling their new Fusion APUs the era of  “Personal Supercomputing”  – and its flagships are on 32nm SOI   We’ve been hearing about these revolutionary chips for years now – the “Fusion” of graphics chips – GPUs – and CPUs on a single piece of silicon, which they’re referring to as an APU – an “Accelerated Processing Unit”.

Launched last week at CES in Las Vegas, the SOI-based “mainstream platform” is primarily intended for performance and mainstream notebooks and mainstream desktops. First up is the 32nm die A-Series “Llano” APU, which includes up to four x86 cores and a DirectX 11-capable discrete-level GPU.  It’s scheduled to ship in the first half of 2011 and appear in products mid-year.

Now, with a bit of detective work, we can sort out the SOI-based APU roadmap that AMD announced at its Financial Analyst’s Day in November 2010.

AMD divides its roadmap into “Notebooks”, “Desktop” and “Server”. Here’s what to look for on 32nm SOI.

Notebooks – CPU/APU Roadmap:

• “Llano” Fusion APU – has 2-4 “Stars” CPU cores  – comes out this year (the 45 to 32nm SOI port of “Stars”, which is based on the existing architecture, was detailed at ISSCC last year)
• Next year (2012), they’ll add the “Trinity” Fusion APU, based on 2-4 all-new next-gen “Bulldozer” CPU cores

Desktop CPU/APU Roadmap:

• This year, look for the “Zambezi” CPU, with 4-8 Bulldozer CPU cores
• and the “Llano” Fusion APU with 2-4 Stars CPU cores
• Next year, it’s the “Komodo” CPU with 8 Bulldozer CPU cores,
• and the “Trinity” Fusion APU with 2-4 next-gen Bulldozer cores

Server CPU Roadmap:

• This year, it’s the “Interlagos” CPU with 8/12/16 Bulldozer CPU cores
• and the “Valencia” CPU with 6/8 Bulldozer CPU cores
• Then next year, it’s the “Terramar” CPU with up to 20 (!!) next-gen Bulldozer CPU cores,
• and “Sepang” with up to 10 next-gen Bulldozer CPU cores.

GlobalFoundries is of course the fab – debuting 32nm SOI with high-k/metal-gate (HK/MG).  Here’s what CEO Doug Grose showed financial analyst’s at the end of 2009 (yes, so you can tell any doubters that GloFo was already showing great HK/MG 32nm SOI over a year ago!):

And here’s what Chekib Akrout, senior vice president and general manager, AMD Technology Development, showed the financial analysts in November 2010:

Very cool stuff.  What do you think?  Will it find its way into your products or onto your desktop this year?

Then of course there’s all these changes in the upper echelons of AMD management that transpired this week, plus the Intel/nVidia settlement.  What does your crystal ball say about all that? Leave a comment and let us know.

(All images courtesy of AMD.)