“We Win Together”, Says Rory Read, CEO of AMD
AMD Fusion
AMD’s Fusion processors have created a new market segment from entry level to mid-budget PCs. Casual gamers who feel that their integrated graphics that comes with the motherboard is insufficient, are feeling great to have an APU from AMD. Another interesting feature from these APUs is that the scaling that we can achieve from hybrid crossfire is so good and also the power consumption is much lesser. To continue this success, AMD has announced that it would prepare the next generation APU with PileDriver modules, i.e Trinity.
AMD is Working with IBM
AMD has already revealed several details about the CPU and GPU performance of mobile Trinity APUs. Also there are some rumors on desktop versions too. The main issue that AMD faced with its Fusion processors was shortage in supply. Still demand for APUs is much higher than supply. So AMD is much serious with this issue, and is very careful to avoid the same with Trinity APUs. So at AMD Financial Analyst Day, revealed that they began working with IBM to manufacture its upcoming PileDriver based Trinity APU. This agreement with International Business Machines (IBM), would allow AMD to ensure adequate availability of the next A-Series APU codenamed “Trinity” under the demands of its OEM partners and the consumer market.
AMD Ensures High Production Volume of Trinity APUs
With this partnership, AMD can make out a better production level, to remain competitive with budget level and entry level Intel processors. Though AMD Llano APU is a better performer than second generation Core i3 processors in terms of graphics, Llano APUs are much behind Core i3 in terms of CPU performance. But this time AMD is implementing its upgraded Bulldozer based, PileDriver modules. They are expected to perform 25% better than Llano CPU part, while the graphical performance will be 50% higher than Llano GPU part. Therefore, having IBM in charge of production of these chips, AMD ensures that a good volume of production for these APUs will be carried out so that the supply meets demand level.
According to Rory Read, CEO of AMD,
“We win together, we have partnership in good times and in difficult times. What we are seeing is a focus on execution running test chips through the [production] line to gather the data [...] with partners from IBM and Globalfoundries, “said Rory Read, chief executive officer of AMD.
AMD currently has 3 manufacturing partners
- TSMC, which is responsible for the production of its GPU and APU
- GlobalFoundries in charge of the APU and CPU
- IBM, who will not compete with AMD’s manufacturing partners, but will be a complement part of the production volume for good availability.
