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Right, so welcome. Very exclusive lecture today. Yeah, so today I will talk a little

bit about what AMD is up to. So what we heard last week was the Intel Skylake architecture.

And today I'm going to present the AMD roadmap, so to say.

So, AMD is a company who is also manufacturing x86 processors.

So they offer a different microarchitecture of an x86 implementation.

And their first release of an x86 CPU was back in 1994, which was the first x86 CPU

from AMD, which was a completely reverse engineered design, reverse engineered from the Intel chips.

And due to the reverse engineering, they had some performance problems.

They were able to offer it at a kind of cheap price, so they got some market share and were

able to continue development up until now.

And what happened after their first x86 CPU implementation is that they drove the innovation

of the whole x86 development process.

So in 1997, they introduced the MMX instruction set extension, which is the vectorization

instructions, the SIMD instructions that we also have in Intel CPUs.

They introduced 3DNow, which is an extension to MMX.

3DNow in that form doesn't exist anymore.

It was completely subsumed by the SSE instructions.

But AMD, back in 1997 and 1998, actually pioneered the whole SIMD idea for the x86 architecture.

What you can also see is that the development of the AMD chips also follows a similar pattern

than what we saw with the Intel chips, right?

This tick-tock pattern, where we reduced the structural width every second release, more

or less.

And another thing that AMD pioneered in was the 64-bit extension for x86.

So that's also why it's still known as AMD64 for some Linux distributions or binary distributions

or whatever, right?

But Intel implements this 64-bit extension as well.

Intel tried a complete redesign of the 30-bit x86 architecture with the Artanium processor,

but they failed, and now everything 64-bit x86 related is what AMD came up with in 2003.

And around 2011, so between 2011 and 2015, the AMD microarchitectures went to a path

where they weren't that interesting anymore for high-performance computing.

I think the Bulldozer chip was the last chip that has been used in one of the supercomputers,

in the Titan supercomputer.

No, this was still an AMD K10.

So the problem there was that they tried an alternative design to share resources, to

scale up their processors.

So they had one core, a core cluster, two cores, and they shared some specific execution

units, mainly the floating-point execution units.

And for that reason, they weren't really interesting for scientific computing anymore because we

had a contention on those floating-point units.

So at this time, AMD got into serious trouble because the sales went down, and eventually

they decided to completely redesign and re-engineer their x86 implementation, and that's when

the Zen design came out last year in 2017.

And that's the topic of this part of the lecture.

So we have the Zen design with a 14 nanometer process, and the Zen Plus with a 12 nanometer

process, and they are continuing to shrink the manufacturing process there.

One question.

Yeah.

I understand that there will be a top of shrinking that all these companies will regale because

there is some issue that will happen with the transistor.