Industry Update - Q2-2005: Chipset wars, AMD's growing market share and more...

Rumor: AMD's Low Cost K8 with Integrated Graphics in 2008?

Apparently, AMD has been talking about doing a very integrated, very low cost K8 derivative for 2008.  The CPU would feature an on-die memory controller like the current Athlon 64. However, it would also feature an on-die graphics core and I/O controller - effectively, removing the need for any chipset on the motherboard. 

If you'll remember a few years back, Intel had a similar chip planned, code-named Timna.  Timna was supposed to integrate a graphics core and memory controller onto a single chip to drive total system costs down considerably, but Intel pulled the plug on the project at the last minute and shifted resources to what eventually became Centrino. 

AMD is definitely in a good position to piece together such a highly integrated CPU, given that they have already integrated the memory controller on-die with much success.  We do wonder where the graphics core would come from, as AMD would either have to design one from scratch or license the technology from another company.  Given that this type of a CPU would be targeted at very low cost markets, it would almost have to be an in-house job.  Granted, this is a very early rumor that may not pan out at all, so take all of this with a grain of salt. 

In the more near-term future, AMD will be transitioning to an on-die DDR2 memory controller by the middle of next year with their new M2 Socket and Socket-F (for desktops and servers respectively).  The initial design guides for boards based on these new sockets have been given to motherboard manufacturers, but the first samples won't be ready until the end of this year. 

Finally, the last piece about AMD here involves Turion.  Either AMD isn't very serious about Turion right now, or manufacturers aren't too impressed with it because we hardly heard any mention of the new mobile CPU at Computex from any of the notebook vendors.  Many product roadmaps going through to the end of this year were completely devoid of any mention of a Turion based notebook.