An illuminating new interview with AMD CTO Mark Papermaster reveals two of the tech giant's biggest upcoming strategies in the near future — which he hopes will set the stage for a battle between AMD and Intel in the CPU market.
Papermaster first discussed how AMD officially plans to introduce "hybrid" CPUs to its consumer product lineup. For the uninitiated, a hybrid architecture uses the performance of a larger core design mixed with the efficiency of smaller cores. The performance core handles the main processing, while the efficiency core handles background processes to free up resources. This is groundbreaking technology, and Intel has introduced some very effective technology in its 12th generation chips.
in his interview Tom's Hardware Papermaster noted that one of the keys to future-proofing CPU technology is knowing when to increase CPU core count and when to rely more on hybrid models, since different applications rely on different core types to be efficient. He asserted that core counts are not increasing. The only way to achieve CPU performance is that AMD must be able to "give customers the diversity of computing elements they need."
He also talked about AMD's use of AI technology for the company's chip design, testing and verification phases, as well as plans to leverage generative AI for chip design in the future. Papermaster first detailed how pervasive AI is in the company: "It's already in our PC lineup, our Ryzen 7040. It's accelerating our embedded, in our adaptive computing, our previous Xilinx product line, and even In GPUs, it's already used to interpolate frames and get better resolution."
Afterwards, Papermaster explained how AI can be used to optimize the design of AMD chips, as it is able to not only iterate, but learn from each iteration - and then improve its design. He also pointed out that AI is very useful when applied to AMD's verification suite, helping to reduce the time required to find errors during the development process.
Promising and questionable news from AMD
this confirmation AMD rumored to enter hybrid architecture Glad to hear it. big. The LITTLE architecture introduced by Intel was one of the best things to happen to its CPUs, with performance far exceeding anything Team Red could offer at the time. So, with AMD revealing that it will use hybrid technology on its own chips, the manufacturer will finally be on par with its competitors.
While hybrid news is totally great to hear, AI news can certainly prove to be more divisive. AMD CTO says manufacturers are already using AI developed for GPU , now it looks like AMD will also use it more in the CPU design and testing process.
On the one hand, AI is a great tool that can handle highly repetitive workloads with high accuracy and efficiency. But on the other hand, if AI expands to other roles at AMD, this could ultimately lead to the elimination of jobs, which will undoubtedly upset a lot of people.
Let’s not forget that the use of AI at this level in the tech industry is very new and we are already seeing it Mishandled by Samsung employees before. So maybe AMD should focus on implementing its hybrid chips first and hold off on developing AI for now - at least until it has a better footing in the CPU market.
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