AMD Needs a Multi-Core Killer App

After it released its first dual core Opteron for servers on April 21, 2005 followed by the Athlon 64 X2 for desktops a month later, Intel released its first dual core, the Pentium Extreme Edition. Around the same time, AMD splashed full-page ads in newspapers calling upon the bigger rival to join a duel to

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The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 15)

SM: What you are proposing sounds very disruptive. AA: It is completely disruptive; we can displace, depending on the market, FPGAs, DSPs, processors, ASICS. Right now initial markets are really in networking, but the fundamental technology is revolutionary. It will be the way all multicore systems are built in the future.

The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 14)

Here we discuss the current market environment, the competitive landscape with a focus on what current chips are being displaced by the multicore chips. SM: I read in the slides you sent me that you are expecting a TAM (Total Available Market) of $54 billion, is this based on the two markets we discussed –

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The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 13)

Here we begin to examine the current market segments where the multicore processors are having a significant impact. The two major markets are networking and multimedia applications. SM: Coming back to where your applications are – complex networking applications, and multimedia, right? AA: I don’t know if you want to use the word complex, because

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The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 12)

SM: How much do people need to learn to be able to optimize programs on the Tilera chips? AA: That depends on the applications and the domain. The good news is you have gotten something working and running. Once you have done that, you can then try various optimizations. You don’t have to read 50

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The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 11)

One of the greatest challenges with Massively Parallel Computing is Programmability. Anant explains Tilera’s approach to software and tools in more detail, and his “gentle slope programming” concept. SM: You created all of the tools from scratch, or did you base them on existing tools? AA: We invented all of this, and it is very

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The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 10)

Here Anant discusses his final area of innovation in Tilera, which is the piece which really supports their go-to-market strategy and allows companies to become early adopters of multicore processors. SM: What is the final innovation? AA: The fifth and final innovation is in software. The third “P” is programmability. There, we have done some

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The Next Big Innovation in Microprocessors: Anant Agarwal (Part 9)

I am curious how Anant addresses the intellectual property strategy for Tilera. In the back of my mind is the story of Tessera, a company that has had fundamental innovations in chip scale packaging, and today every single manufacturer of miniaturized consumer devices violate their patent, and pay them royalties. Some of the innovations that

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