Boy, having the opportunity to sit down with Scott Wasson of AMD must have been a real thrill. During the interview, they talked a lot about the future of AMD and the processors that they are producing. Great read, definitely check it out, folks!

Along with Scott Wasson of The Tech Report and Kyle Bennett of HardOCP, we recently had some time to sit down and talk with AMD’s CTO Fred Weber about his vision of the future of microprocessors. We took the opportunity to compare and contrast his vision with our discussions from this year’s Spring IDF that we had written about.

Be sure to read our IDF Spring 2005 - Predicting Future CPU Architecture Trends article before continuing as it provides a lot of background information necessary for this piece.

The ILP/TLP Debate in AMD’s Shoes
When we talked to Intel at IDF, we had the distinct impression that the focus on improving microprocessor performance as a whole had shifted pretty significantly from ILP to TLP. To put it plain and simple, making individual cores faster was no longer top priority; rather, getting multiple cores to work together was the new focus.

Weber’s stance on ILP vs. TLP tended to agree with what we had heard from Intel; TLP is the future and using ILP to increase performance is at a point of extremely diminished returns. That being said, we asked Fred where he thought the improvements in ILP would be going forward and he responded with the following four areas: [Read the rest]