14 DAY TRIAL // Intel would probably love to have the server industry all to itself, and maybe the rest of the processor segment too, but Advanced Micro Devices isn't sitting idly by, no matter what impressions it may give off.
Of course, the many articles about AMD's graphics cards and A-Series accelerated processing units have made it clear that the company is quite active.
Nevertheless, there hasn't been, recently, much movement from it on the server and workstation front.
The last time we got a teaser about the Steamroller architecture, for instance, was back in 2012, months upon months ago.
The time that went by without any updates on the Sunnyvale, California-based company's part was enough to make people wonder.
Fortunately, whatever concerns may have arisen can be put to rest: AMD will definitely not fail to release the Steamroller architecture this year.
In a PDF document unveiled just the other day, Advanced Micro Devices shows that Opteron CPUs designed on the Steamroller core will arrive this year.
No specific timeline is provided, nor is there a table with all the models and their specifications. Such details aren't likely to make their way to the net until a few months down the line.
AMD does redeclare, however, that Steamroller will emphasize parallelism and will be available to IT backroom well in advance of launch (probably).
The slide above shows the general roadmap. In addition to Steamroller, it specifies the “Excavator” series that will succeed it at some point in the future. No years are given, so we can't say for sure whether it will be in 2014 or 2015, or later.
In any case, Advanced Micro Devices will have to directly challenge the Intel Xeon collections that will debut over the next four quarters. A tall order, to be sure, but AMD will probably play the affordability card to even the odds.