My IDF Highlights and Talking to AMD

I've been traveling for the month of September. It started with a trip to Santa Clara, then San Fran, then Denver, then San Fran again and I just closed out the month today with a 24 hour trip to Toronto (I'll touch on why in a moment).

IDF was interesting; it was smaller than previous shows, and definitely more dead than I remember it being last year, that being said there were some highlights.

1) Nehalem. Even AMD will admit (quietly) that the Nehalem demo was impressive. Penryn hasn't even launched yet and Nehalem is already up and running OSes. I don't doubt that clocks are low and the chip is buggy, but we're about 12 months away from launch too. AMD is skeptical that Intel can pull off an integrated memory controller that quickly, if Nehalem does indeed launch in mid to end of 2008 then AMD will be in some trouble for a while.

2) Silverthorne. I love this chip; well, the idea of it at least. If you've read my frustrations with processors in CE devices, I do believe that AMD and Intel hold the answer to improving performance and interoperability in the consumer electronics space with their new low power, low cost x86 cores that we'll begin seeing soon. Silverthorne is just the beginning, the real excitement is...

3) Moorestown. The Intel mock-iPhone demo is exactly where I see Moorestown being used. It'll be a couple of years at least but I can stand to wait. I think the next 3 - 5 years will see some serious innovation in the mobile market, especially with regards to ultra mobile devices like the iPhone. The iPhone is quite impressive today, and in 12 - 18 months we'll see some real competition to it, as well as continual updates from Apple itself. Life should be good. Moorestown will be particularly interesting at 32nm, the initial 45nm offering may be a little too large/power hungry for the type of exotic applications I'm envisioning.

Those were my highlights from IDF, now on to Toronto. I was there visiting AMD to talk about you know what. There's not much I can say, which is unfortunate. I really wonder how many times Intel will have to allow the press to benchmark an unreleased processor under supervision before AMD will let us do the same.

I have a feeling Phenom may end up being a little more competitive than expected, especially because Penryn won't hit the mainstream until next year. Once dual-core Penryn reaches the market in early '08 then AMD will be in for a rough ride. I seriously doubt we'll be seeing an upset on the level of what Intel did with the Core 2 launch however; that processor and microarchitecture look like they'll remain on top for the near future.

I talked to AMD about triple core, which will be coming in the beginning of 2008 as quad-cores with one core disabled. It doesn't look like triple core will ever be its own design, so the product will last as long as it can. Either quad-core will get cheap enough to make triple core obsolete or triple core demand will be high enough to warrant it sticking around, but I figure it'll end up going away. Until then it should offer an interesting affordable alternative to dual-core, unfortunately we'll have to wait until next year to see it.