Thread: Anandtech News

Until now, the way voice has worked on handsets with a 4G LTE air interface has been, well, interesting. That is to say, thus far all voice calls haven't been over 4G LTE but conventional circuit-switched (as opposed to packet-switched) 2G or 3G networks like CDMA2000 1x in 3GPP2 land, or WCDMA/GSM in 3GPP land. For example, on Verizon LTE the handset has a second radio always camping 1x for voice and SMS, and on AT&T LTE the handset falls back from LTE to WCDMA for the voice transaction. This is CSFB - Circuit-Switched FallBack. LTE deployments thus far have focused primarily on data connectivity for a variety of reasons, and further logistical hurdles like emergency call support has made VoLTE effectively only possible in 3GPP Release 9.

Following their first quarter earnings announcement (and quiet period), Qualcomm is lifting the veil on news of a successful SR-VCC (Single Radio Voice Call Continuity) call which took place December 23, 2011 on an Ericsson test network using a Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 SoC. This marked the first successful trial of a VoLTE call which originated in the VoIP/IMS packet-switched domain handing over to WCDMA's circuit-switched domain. While this news is effectively a technology demonstration on a test network, this is just one more sign that the dual baseband cellular architecture (and associated power draws) we've talked about already is on its way out this upcoming year. With the appropriate software updates to radio access hardware, sufficient carrier testing, and the appropriate baseband support, it's looking like 2012 might be the year we finally get handsets with VoLTE enabled out of the box.
The Ericsson device and a demonstration network will be on display at MWC 2012, and we're looking forward to seeing VoLTE in action.
Source: Qualcomm



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AMD's Financial Analyst Day is under way and we're currently hearing from Rory Read about the future of the company. Specifics and roadmaps will follow, but the fundamental shift is outlined below:

AMD used to focus on PC clients and servers in mature markets. It used OEMs as the primary delivery vehicle for its products. Going forward AMD wants to focus more on client mobility, not smartphones but ultra thin notebooks, tablets and other similar devices. Rory was very clear to point out that AMD has no intentions of competing in the ultra low margin smartphone SoC space, but there's a lot more to mobility than just that. We'll still see a cloud computing focus from AMD, which makes sense as the server business has always been very profitable. AMD will also focus more on emerging markets (Brazil, Russia, India, China, etc...) rather than just the mature markets as that's where a huge amount of growth will happen in the future. From a product standpoint, AMD is really focusing on its mainstream and entry level APUs. Rory didn't come out and say it here but no where in AMD's future direction is a focus on the high-end x86 CPU space.
Also note that AMD isn't going to be as focused on delivering high performance products on the absolute latest process node. It views Brazos as one of its biggest successes to date and that architecture was built on a 40nm process with an easily synthesizable architecture. It's likely that the future of AMD is built around more of these easy to manufacture SoCs rather than highly custom, bleeding edge CPUs.
AMD plans on leveraging OEMs to deliver its products but it also wants to explore other routes as well. Rory referenced the game console model, where AMD would sell an ODM a chip solution tailored specifically to their needs. AMD wants to use this model to complement the more traditional route of selling its products. The transition here makes sense if you look at the current tablet space. The SoC players in tablets effectively follow the game console model. You buy a tablet that has an SoC that's custom tailored to its needs rather than buying a system with a myriad of CPU options.



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Don't expect AMD to go into much detail on this here at the Financial Analyst Day, but the slide above shows a definite step towards becoming a modern SoC company. Looking at TI, Qualcomm, NVIDIA and even Intel, integrating 3rd party IP into an SoC isn't unusual - particularly when competing in the ultra mobile space. AMD wants the same flexibility. Going forward, if AMD is successful, we will see SoCs based on AMD technologies that are combined with 3rd party IP. In theory this could come in the form of anything from a video decoder/encoder block to an ARM based CPU/GPU. AMD has mentioned ARM a few times in its presentations today but don't expect any major announcements here. The key word here is agility. AMD wants to be an SoC company that can deliver whatever combination of first and third party IP that the customer wants.



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AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster just put up this slide that shows its HSA (Heterogeneous Systems Architecture) roadmap through 2014. This year we got Graphics Core Next, but next year we'll see a unified address space that both AMD CPUs and GPUs can access (today CPUs and GPUs mostly store separate copies of data in separate memory spaces). In 2014 AMD plans to deliver HSA compatible GPUs that allow for true heterogeneous computing where workloads will run, seamlessly, on both CPUs and GPUs in parallel. The latter is something we've been waiting on for years now but AMD seems committed to delivering it in a major way in just two years.



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If you want to follow the CTO presentation we've been quoting from a lot today, check it out in the gallery below.
Gallery: AMD Financial Analyst Day 2012 - Mark Papermaster, SVP & CTO Presentation





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The slide above gives an example of the new agile/flexible AMD as it applies to the datacenter. Again, we're not seeing ARM, but we are seeing that AMD is willing to be flexible around ISA. In other words, AMD won't be married to x86 if the customer doesn't want it. If I had to guess, it sounds like AMD is talking about offering ARM based SoCs in the datacenter if a customer should want one.
HSA will also play a role here. It seems like AMD views its flexibility around IP integration in combination with its GPU architecture as its main advantages in the datacenter. Should GPU compute prove to be widely useful in enterprise applications remains to be seen. Clearly highly parallel workloads lend themselves very well to GPUs.




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The presentations we've seen from AMD thus far today haven't been very specific in terms of numbers, but there's a lot of reading between the lines that we can do here. AMD already mentioned that it's no longer interested in pursuing bleeding edge process technologies, but its CTO expanded on that idea by mentioning that AMD will transition to shorter design cycles. We got a hint of this transition with the annual Brazos/Llano cadence, but now it's official AMD policy to have shorter design cycles. These shorter design cycles will leverage lower amounts of custom block design and lean more on easily synthesizable architectures. The tradeoff is obviously performance but you do get better time to market. As was the case with Brazos however, if you can bring the right combination of technologies to market at the right time, the tradeoff is worth it.



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The slide above really puts AMD's focus into perspective. AMD is mostly interested in markets that have high annual growth rates. Looking above you can see that pretty much all of those categories with the exception of the client desktop are interesting for AMD. It's about time that AMD focused more on mobile and I don't believe that it's too late for the company, but it is sad to think that the high-end desktop CPU market won't be as important to AMD going forward. It's likely the right decision for AMD but it's truly the end of an era.



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We've got a server roadmap update from AMD courtesy of its Financial Analyst Day here in Santa Clara, California. The changes to the 2012 - 2013 roadmap aren't all that startling. Obviously this year AMD delivers top to bottom Bulldozer based CPUs. Interlagos, which we've already reviewed, features between 4 and 16 Bulldozer cores (2 - 8 modules). There are 2 and 3 module variants as well: Zurich and Valencia, respectively. All three of these Bulldozer based CPUs fall in the Opteron 6200 line.
Originally AMD had talked about introducing a new G2012 platform and delivering 10 & 20-core solutions called Sepang and Terramar. Those plans have been scrapped for the moment and what we get instead is a drop-in replacement for existing Opteron 6200 CPUs.
Take the current 6200 lineup, upgrade the CPU cores to Piledriver and you get a high level look at AMD's near-term server strategy. The sockets remain the same, as do the core counts, but performance should go up. AMD hasn't given us any more detail as to what Piledriver fixes other than to say that it's a higher IPC version of Bulldozer.

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AMD's Trinity APU, due out near the middle of the year, will combine two Piledriver modules (four "cores") with an even beefier GPU. We've already laid out the general performance expectations for Trinity here, but today AMD showed off a ~18mm thick Trinity reference design built by Compal. Price points for Trinity systems like this will be sub $900 and AMD is promising better battery life than competing 17W designs (clearly a jab at Ultrabooks).

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