AMD’s new flagship “Bulldozer” for servers and desktops is coming and will start shipping to partners next month, but now we have the roadmap for the coming year and we see great changes. The high-end processors gets an integrated northbridge, and the platform for the budget segment “Deccan” will be the first SoC design from AMD.
AMD hasn’t even launched the new one before the next generation leaks. We see three new platforms to come next year where they will replace all products from 2011 in the form of AMD Velocity, that has promised a new CPU, GPU and APU annually.
AMD’s APU roadmap until the end of 2015
First we have the new platform Corona, that sports a Komodo CPU. Komodo will sport up to 10 improved Bulldozer cores called “Piledriver”. We also see AMD Turbo Core 3.0 and Socket FM2. The southbridge of Corona is called Hudson D4 and brings eight SATA 6 Gb/s, four USB 3.0 ports, RAID 0/1/5/10 and integrated clock generator. Corona will not have a separate northbridge, but it will be integrated like Intel’s processors and AMD:s own Llano.
The next on the list is Virgo where we see the least changes. Trinity is the APU that is used and will replace the just launched Llano, with up to four Piledriver cores, AMD Turbo Core 3.0 and a GPU based on a VLIW-4 architecture with DirectX 11 GPU. Trinity will offer 50% better performance (GigaFLOPS) than Llano. The southbridge is the same that we see for Llano and Lynx, namely A55 and A75.
Trinity appeared in June during AMD Fusion Developer Summit
Last we have the Deccan platform that will replace Brazos and the C, T and E series APUs with TDP at 4.5W to 18W. Deccan comes only with Wichita so it looks like it has skipped the codename Krishna. Wichita had a TDP at 3W in sight for tablets with 1-2 cores, but this has changed and the name Wichita will cover the whole Deccan platform.
Wichita comes with up to four Bobcat cores, “improved Bobcat cores”, DirectX 11 GPU with unknown specifications. Wichita will like the APUs of the Brazos platform be soldered to the PCB, but will not be compatible with the current FT1 socket. Wichita uses FT2 since it has an integrated southbridge called “Yuba” where the details are yet to be revealed. Wichita will be AMD’s first SoC design with CPU, GPU, northbridge and southbridge on the same silicon.
Komodo and Trinity will build on the same manufacturing process at GlobalFoundries as Llano and Bulldozer; 32nm SOI/HKMG. Wichita will be made at TSMC using its new Bulk/HKMG. The launch dates are unknown with Deccan, but it will most likely appear near the end of the year or early 2012 while Trinity and Komodo are slated for the Summer of 2012. It seems like Komodo and Trinity will both use Socket FM2, but we don’t know what the compatibility will be like. On the other hand AM3+ doesn’t look like the most long-lived socket from the company.
Source: zol.com.cn
