Q10: With the Zen core and the Zeppelin design, AMD essentially has one version of its silicon for PC/enterprise and one version of silicon for the mobile parts coming out the factories. If AMD had the resources and budget to have a wider silicon design portfolio, would there be more scope to trying for more esoteric IPC gains for specific product lines?
LS: I think that our CPU roadmap actually is very ambitious and I think microarchitecture is one piece of it. What you heard from Mark Papermaster with what we’re doing in terms of cross-chip interconnect and power management, and then system-wide thinking in terms of how we put the chips together. I actually think it is not a resource constraint problem necessarily, it is really more about where we want to focus our efforts on the CPU side.
On the GPU side, we have multiple teams that are looking at how to improve the instruction set as you go forward and I would say that we are thinking on the compute aspect of GPUs. How do we think about sort of the traditional GPU engines to special accelerators, things like that.
Q: Does that mean that there is room in the future for GPU bifurcation, between a gaming focus and a compute focus?
LS: I think there is. You will see us move on this, and we’re very committed to gaming so that’s not going to change, but you will see us do some more purpose-built products for the compute side of things.