A long look at AMD's Analyst Day - SemiAccurate
At AMD’s 2022 Financial Analyst Day, the company laid out a lot of future directions and code names. Some of these have been featured on SemiAccurate previously but the big picture they drew was quite interesting.
Lets take a look at what AMD said at FAD 2022 and try to answer the question of why more than what. There was a blizzard of code names, roadmaps, and processes, some important others less so. The direction AMD is taking however is quite clear, more of the same with better tech, smaller nodes, and more variety.
The big order of the day, it was aimed at financial analysts after all, were the twin acquisitions of Xilinx and Pensando. As SemiAccurate has stated before, we think the Xilinx deal is a really smart one. Yesterday AMD laid out plans for tight integration of Xilinx IP and FPGA blocks into various products, a faster and more granular mix than we had expected. If AMD can pull it off it will be in stark contrast to the way Intel has dealt with subsumed companies. On the Pensando side we are not as optimistic for all the reasons AMD claimed as wins, but that is a topic for a future article. In short Xilinx good, Pensando not so much.
Mark Papermaster was the first to lay out new details with the above roadmap. During the end Q&A there were a lot of questions about what the various process nodes meant above the generational advances. The answer was that with chiplets you will see a mix of processes in each device so don’t read too much into the nodes listed. This is absolutely true but if those numbers encompass the chiplets on a package, the Zen4 family should be listed as 7nm/5nm/4nm because the IOD is 7nm on Genoa.
