AMD’s roadmaps are a perpetual source of discussion amongst enthusiasts, analysts, and company fans. Much of the discussion is often stoked by rumor or flatly made-up slides. This week, AMD CEO Rory Read gave a presentation for Deutsche Bank — and in the process, laid out the company’s roadmap over the next several years.

Enthusiasts barking up the wrong tree

Before diving into Read’s remarks, I think it’s important to address the fundamental difference between how a lot of AMD’s historic fans see the company versus the direction AMD is now charting. The enthusiast community has a long tradition of viewing AMD’s performance through Intel and Nvidia-specific lenses. There’s nothing wrong with this, as such, but it misses a critical fact: when Rory Read took over as CEO of AMD, that narrow focus, combined with multiple execution problems, had nearly killed the company.

AMD still cares about its traditional markets, but they aren’t driving the entire structure anymore. Going forward, AMD believes embedded computing, dense servers, high-performance GPUs, and professional graphics are just as important to its profitability. Read’s goal is to move AMD away from a model where the company relied upon lightning in a bottle strategy and only turned a profit two years out of eight.

Products and process

In the past it was assumed that AMD would automatically move to new process nodes as soon as those nodes became available. One thing Read emphasized was that 28nm would remain a major node for AMD for quite some time to come, saying:

I don’t think we’re at the peak of volume for 28-nanometer. We’re going to continue to leverage that and I think there is great opportunity to make money on that… The mix for us has to be where we can get the yields and the business like game consoles, semi-custom, embedded, and even in client, 28-nanometer is going to be just fine for the next several years.

In his very next sentence, Read seems to reverse himself, saying “Now, will we move down to Fins? Yes, absolutely, and our next generation products go there and as we introduce them in [20]16.”

Here’s what this means, in aggregate: AMD is planning to invest in next-generation process nodes at 20nm and 16/14nm FinFET, but only on certain products and only when the company believes it can recoup substantial investments from doing so. AMD’s presentations to date have hinted that when its combined ARM/x86 platform debuts next year, both Jaguar and its Cortex-A57 chips will be built on 20nm, incorporate HSA support, and use a common graphics core. This implies that AMD’s low-power x86 chips could see a nice uptick in performance year on year.

Similarly, Read hinted that K12 and AMD’s upcoming Zen platform will move to 16nm and FinFETs fairly aggressively (if they don’t deploy on those technologies to start with). Big cores like the current Kaveri, FX-series, and upcoming Carrizo, on the other hand, well — those are precisely the volume parts that are going to stay back on older process nodes.

We actually see signs of this strategy already. Trot over to NewEgg, and the 17 APUs on sale there aren’t all Kaveri or even all Richland — AMD still has a healthy number of Trinity-class parts on the market. In the Dirk Meier era, AMD’s strategy was to shift to the entire stack to a new node as quickly as possible in order to maximize cost savings on a new node. What Read has laid out is a different plan, in which AMD only moves to new nodes when it makes sense to do so for each particular class of parts.