AMD made several interesting announcements during its Financial Analyst Day.
Concerning the production of processors, for the time being there will be no further outsourcing. The FAB 36 and 38 located in Dresden are still in effect, the construction of the FAB 4X in New York is planned and production lines at Chartered Semiconductor can also be used if necessary. Collaboration with IBM only concerns R&D and in addition the two companies are already working on 22nm.
For GPUs, the strategy also remains unchanged with production entrusted to TSMC, UMC as well as Chartered.
As for the Fusion project, it seems to be moving along but the first APU (Accelerated Processor Unit) called "Swift" will not arrive before the second half of 2009. Composed of at least two cores from the third generation of processors in the "Stars" family, (the Barcelona from the first) and a graphics core derived from a classic GPU, it will be engraved in 45nm and found in laptops. Moreover, there will be the integration of a PCI-E controller which should enable reducing the Southbridge to a minimum.
Little information was revealed on future GPUs, not even a potential mobile high end RV6xx. The potential M8x which has native DisplayPort support is probably the RV620 and RV635 that we will find on the desktop under the names Radeon HD 3400 and 3600, respectively. Note that these two GPUs also have a second generation UVD engine.
Finally, the R700 has been "delayed". We can assume that if it doesn’t arrive in 2009, it has been cancelled and replaced by the following generation renamed the R700.
In the short term, we will therefore have to look to multi GPUs to increase performances. Whether it’s with CrossFireX (tri & quad GPUs) or with the R680, which is a card that has two RV670. While an R6xx(TM) is indeed present on certain slides, nothing tells us that it’s actually an R680 or a new GPU.
