AMD Unveils Server Roadmap: Steamroller Coming Early 2014, ARM Late 2014

AMD has just revealed to us today their updated 2013 to 204 server roadmap. AMD’s server roadmap is often an indication of the consumer CPU market in that new architectures tend to hit the server platforms about 3-6 months before the consumer platforms. That said what is quite interesting about this new roadmap from AMD is we can clearly see the introduction of the new Steamroller architecture from 2014. This is based on a 28nm process and has 4 cores. Furthermore AMD is implementing its HSA application support that it has been working on for quite some time since joining the HSA foundation.

While Steamroller is coming in 2014 it appears we have to wait to beyond 2014 to get a release on “more than 4 core” Steamroller Opteron CPUs. This suggests that Piledriver based Opterons will be the mainstay of the AMD high performance server portfolio until at least 2015. Another interesting development revealed by the roadmap is that of the codename “Seattle” CPUs. This is AMD’s first venture into the world of ARM and their Seattle CPUs are based on the ARM Cortex A57 architecture and will probably be multicore CPUs up to four cores. Furthermore these won’t just be CPUs but SoCs (system on chip) meaning it is likely AMD will be integrating its Radeon or FirePro class graphics onto these ARM SoCs.

Image courtesy of AMD