A revealing new interview with AMD CTO Mark Papermaster reveals two of the tech giant’s biggest strategies for the near future — ones he hopes will level the playing field between AMD and Intel in the CPU market .
Papermaster began by discussing how AMD officially plans to introduce “hybrid” CPUs in its consumer lineup. For the uninitiated, hybrid architectures use larger cores designed for performance combined with smaller efficiency cores. Performance cores handle most of the processing, while efficiency cores take care of background processes to free up resources. It’s a breakthrough technology that Intel has introduced in its 12th generation chips to great effect.
during an interview Tom’s HardwareAccording to Papermaster, one of the keys to future-proofing CPU technology is knowing when to increase the number of CPU cores and when to rely more on a hybrid model, since different applications rely on different core types to run efficiently. He asserts that core count isn’t the only way to boost CPU performance, and that AMD must be able to “give customers the every computing element they need.”
He also spoke about AMD’s use of AI technology in the company’s chip design, testing, and validation phases, as well as future plans to leverage generative AI in chip design. Papermaster begins by detailing just how pervasive AI is at the company: “It’s already in our PC lineup, including our Ryzen 7040. It’s being accelerated in our embedded, adaptive computing, our former Xilinx lineup.” development, and even in the GPU it has been used to interpolate frames and get better resolutions.”
Afterwards, Papermaster explained how AI can be used to optimize the design of AMD chips because it not only has the ability to iterate, but learns from each iteration and then improves its design. He also noted that AI is useful when applied to AMD’s verification suite, helping to reduce the time it takes to find bugs during development.
Promising and dubious news from AMD
this confirmation AMD is rumored to be dabbling in hybrid architectures Glad to hear it. The big.LITTLE architecture that Intel introduced was one of the best things about its CPUs, with a performance boost far beyond anything Team Red could offer at the time. So with AMD revealing that it will use hybrid technology in its own chips, the manufacturer will finally be on an equal footing with its rivals.
While mixed news is nice to hear, AI news is sure to be more divisive. AMD CTO said that manufacturers are already using AI for GPU Developmentit now appears that AMD will use it more in the CPU design and testing process as well.
On the one hand, AI is an excellent tool for handling extremely repetitive workloads with high precision and efficiency.But on the other hand, if AI expands to other roles at AMD, it could end up causing layoffs, which will no doubt upset a lot of people
Don’t forget, the use of artificial intelligence at this level of the tech industry is very new and we’ve seen Mishandled by Samsung employees forward. So maybe AMD should focus on enabling its hybrid chips first, and put AI development on hold for now — at least until it has a firm foothold in the CPU market.