An Interview with AMD's Henri Richard December 19, 2003 Brandon Sandman Bell

Introduction

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The last half of 2003 has been a busy period for AMD. Fresh off the unveiling of their 64-bit processors for the server/workstation market in the form of Opteron, the company has recently launched its desktop and mobile 64-bit variants, Athlon 64 for the mainstream market, and at the very high-end, Athlon 64 FX. In light of these developments, we thought it was time to catch up with a representative from AMD to discuss these products, their adoption among both partners and consumers, as well as the challenges they face. Of course, we also didn’t forget to ask about AMD’s chief rival, Intel!

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Gaming (cont’d)/Henri’s PC

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FiringSquad: AMD has always had a loyal following among the gaming community. Why do you think this is so? Do you think your participation in the Professional Gaming League (PGL) helped?

Henri Richard: Well I think that the reason why we’ve always had such a great reception among the gaming community is because they’re technology savvy people. We’ve always been in the general market, but somewhat outdone by the heavy marketing of our competitor. But when it comes to the reality of performance, value, and real innovation you’re talking to a technology savvy user and the core of our marketing covers reality and in reality [inaudible] are better, that we’ve been leading in many areas and I think that they also recognize that they get a better value out of an AMD system. So I think that’s the reason.

Also, we have a very open approach to the entire add-in system. And so typically you’ll see some really great things from the motherboard guys and the AMD infrastructure. Whereas our competitor has the tendency to try to do everything themselves and somewhat stifle competition and innovation on their platform.

Often independently from the processor performance, the overall platform that you can find around the AMD infrastructures are just better.

As far as sponsoring the gaming community obviously I think that’s very important for us, particularly since we now have the Athlon FX of really great products for that very high end community. I believe that with the Athlon FX platforms you can actually be unbeatable because of the response time of the system and so I want to do as much as we can afford to in terms of sponsoring the gaming community.

FiringSquad: Earlier you said that you actually build your own gaming rigs. Can you tell us a little about your PC/building experience, and your current gaming system?

Henri Richard: Sure. Yeah so I always build my own systems I like to plan my builds, I like to select components. I typically, you know I’m blessed with many connections within the industry so I work with partners, that, you know, if they need beta testers…[I’m there]

But my configuration today is, well I have two configurations. I have a water cooled Athlon XP 3200+. I’m using the Koolance water-cooling system. On that system I’ve got an NVIDIA GeForce FX 5900 and 2GB of memory and there’s two 250GB Maxtor Serial ATA hard drives. So that’s my XP 3200 and I just finished putting together an Athlon 64 FX 51 that’s in a Thermaltake box. It’s not water-cooled but it’s a very cool box, with seven thermostatically controlled fans, very low RPM fans. In that one I’ve got an NVIDIA 5950, the latest one, and also dual 250GB Maxtor drives and 4GB of memory and I just purchased the latest Sound Blaster ZS, the Audigy 2 ZS. I have to confess that I haven’t been fortunate to, well I’ve been on the road for two weeks so I haven’t had the chance to actually setup the system and install the software that I want on it yet.

But I like to test. I like, well my systems are constantly in a state of evolution. I have seven different platforms at home that I keep rotating. I also have a home server that I run 24/7 that I use as a gaming server. I also fitted it with an FM radio emitter. That’s my own private radio station without any advertisements on it that’s basically using Winamp and scanning a database of MP3 files that I made out of my CD collection of over 12,000 titles.

FiringSquad: Wow that’s pretty impressive

Henri Richard: Yeah, it’s great. I’m surprised, you know that FM card is like $150 bucks and I’m surprised that there aren’t more people that use that because every time I talk to friends or people in the industry about it they think it’s a cool idea because a lot of people don’t want advertisements when you listen to the radio and it’s [inaudible] and it’s doing 50 milliwatts. You know it gives me basically, the range is about half a mile from my house and it gets great reception, it’s really cool. I expect that one of these days it will be a standard feature in multimedia PCs.



SIDEBAR: AMD’s Professional Gaming League was run in part by FiringSquad founders Dennis & Lyle Fong as well as Kenn Hwang

Overclocking and the Athlon 64 FX

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FiringSquad: Obviously we know that AMD doesn’t advocate overclocking, but have you overclocked any of your personal systems?

Henri Richard: Sure. I actually test my systems for their overclocking capabilities. I find it an interesting, you know an interesting way of understanding what people out there are doing and what are the consequences of it for the system.

You know overclocking, of course it’s not recommended but it’s very dependent on how well you’re cooling your system. And as you know we now have a policy to lock down the frequency of all the products so there’s one product that will continue to be open and it’s the FX product line. The Athlon 64 FX will never be locked and it will continue to evolve for the people that buy those parts at the very high end of the market to get the most out of the experience in terms of overclocking.

FiringSquad: One advantage the Athlon 64 FX adds over the Athlon 64 is an unlocked multiplier. Can you describe how this idea got started? Were any executives nervous about adding this feature?

Henri Richard: Well first I think nature will find a way. You can’t, you know you can’t keep people from testing and doing things like that. We don’t support or recommend it but you have to acknowledge there are these people out there. What I’d rather do as a marketing strategy is we settle this creative energy on our platforms on one particular part that is designed from the ground up to be a very high end part which would allow people to go and play around with it and do all kinds of, you know performance boosting.

The problem with overclocking in general is that if you let it go uncontrolled you end up with people who are not gamers that are just, you know, greedy people who are selling systems to uneducated users, overclocking them and you know it’s not properly cooled and that has a drastic affect on the life cycle of the product and then your brand gets affected because you’ve got someone who just bought a system and he didn’t understand at all what he was buying and ends up with problems so at the end of the day it’s the AMD name that gets tainted.

You know I have a very open mind about this but on one hand its very important for us to protect our brand to make sure people like what they bought and so we need to be very strict in terms of keeping, you know unethical individuals who overclock and sell a product. That’s not right. But on the other side of the spectrum it’s great to have a bunch of enthusiasts out there that really love AMD, love the brand and want to get the best out of it. You know that’s okay for them to have a part that they can go and play around with.

FiringSquad: Will AMD be adding anything to the Athlon 64 FX in the future to make it more appealing to gamers/enthusiasts over the conventional Athlon 64 or do you think the unlocked multiplier is enough?

Henri Richard: Well you know I think that the FX is going to be an ongoing favorite with the gamers. It really will vindicate us being the fastest product out there. It’s a great part, we believe that, you know people who like the full power of 64-bit as both the operating system on the Windows side and some of the games that aren’t available quite yet but I believe that some of the games will start shipping before year end. There’s a lot of headroom in that part in terms of what you can experience from a gaming perspective once you’re able to completely unleash the 64-bitness.

So that’s really the one thing to go and focus on, which is we’ve got the right software out there that will take advantage of this great engine. In terms of technical changes or things that we could do to the part I don’t want to make any comments at this point.



SIDEBAR: Our Athlon 64 FX article

P4 EE/HT/Multiprocessing

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FiringSquad: What are your thoughts on Intel’s Pentium 4 Extreme Edition? Do you feel it was a knee-jerk reaction by Intel to Athlon 64 FX?

Henri Richard: I think that uh, [laughs] I think that imitation is a great form of flattery and it’s very clear that this is a part that they basically put together in a hurry to respond to Athlon FX and it’s very clear that it was not on their roadmap and I think we caught them by surprise and like usual when it’s a reaction that’s not planned you come out with a pretty unappealing solution and I think that’s the general consensus in the marketplace that the ugh, that product is not a great product.

FiringSquad: Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology has lots of promise, but very few applications support it directly. What is your take on this new feature?

Henri Richard: Well I believe that, you know again it’s a software issue here. I don’t recall [inaudible] 64-bit in Hyper-Threading, not that they’re exclusive to each other. But we’ve chosen the path of 64-bit and that’s the path we’re going to push. I also believe that, well I’m always concerned when marketing comes on top of you know some sort of feature and it confuses people.

I think that representing Hyper-Threading as buying two processors for the price of one is deceiving customers, and that’s not AMD’s strategy.

I believe that the future of desktop computing will go with the future of server, which is multi-core processors. There you will have multiple core processors and when you say you have dual processors you really will have two processors and you’ll get much better scalability of performance than Hyper-Threading.

Now this being said, you know like any technology we’re looking at it, and it’s not that complex of a technology to implement. If customers, if the marketplace finally endorse that technology over multi-core processors then we’ll deliver what the customer wants us to do. But at this point in time I’m a believer that 64-bit on one side and multi-core CPUs are approachable relevant to the future of our industry more so than Hyper-Threading.

FiringSquad: So you acknowledge that AMD has looked into multi-core CPUs?

Henri Richard: Well, we’ve announced it, but I’m not telling you that tomorrow morning on the desktop that [we’ll have it] but we have stated clearly that we are working on multi-core CPUs on Opteron and as you know Opteron, the natural destination of Opteron ends up in the FX range. So it’s easy to assess that AMD will announce the official you know, Opteron multi-core product. Sometime down the line later you’ll find a multi-core desktop product because it’s the same core.


SIDEBAR: Our interview with Epic’s Tim Sweeney on 64-bit software.

The 64-bit software transition

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FiringSquad: What steps are AMD taking to evangelize its 64-bit architecture to game developers?

Henri Richard: Well we’re working hard at, of course, supporting our software ISVs. You know, making sure they’re very consistent at driving [forward]. One of the things that I think is very interesting is that on one side software developers are ecstatic about 64-bit. They like our 64-bit environment because it’s very easy to port to, you don’t have to retrain your developers to 64-bit extensions. The 64-bit extensions are really extensions to the 32-bit environment. So unlike other architectures where you have to completely relearn the language and the compiler, building 64-bit software with AMD-64 is very easy.

But on the other hand it is very backward compatible, and so some developers are just taking an easier route, which is instead of optimizing the entire architecture or porting the entire application they are really looking at which DLL in their product, which DLL would really benefit from 64-bit, and you have the ability to go and somewhat optimize that application without completely rewriting it, keeping some parts of the application in 32-bit and just porting the 64-bit, the code that will benefit the most from that 64-bitness.

So on one side we see a lot of excitement, we see people are very happy with the ease of porting. And on the other side we’ve got also the path of least resistance, which is well, here’s my 32-bit application it works great so I’m not necessarily in a hurry to port to 64-bit, or, I’m only going to port the pieces that are going to get the most kick in terms of performance and we’ll do a full 64-bit application later. We’re seeing the full spectrum, we’ve got software vendors that are very aggressively porting and we’ve got the people who are just trying to optimize under the environment and we’ve got others that are saying, you know, I’m going to go ahead and certify my 32-bit app because I’m getting great performance from Athlon 64 in 32-bit mode and I’ll do a 64-bit port later.

FiringSquad: Are you seeding developers with hardware, or is, exactly how is the process working?

Henri Richard: We have a lab. Well, there’s different things, of course we’re trying to help software developers with technical support, you know, this type of system and everything that’s standard in the industry in terms of helping software developers support their product.

We also have a lab in Sunnyvale and we’re opening other labs in several locations around the world, where developers can come in and work on our machines and we make them available to them. It’s more relevant to high performance computing, we’re building some very impressive clusters where developers can come and test their code. Then I believe that we also have game development people that are coming in. We’re also doing a lot of work with the people in the video industry because that’s another area where the AMD-64 architecture is providing some very significant advantages.

[inaudible]

We also have a system lab where developers can come and test their code on very large AMD-64 based systems.

FiringSquad: Epic has been pretty vocal about their support for AMD-64, adding 64-bit extensions to Unreal Tournament and using it for development of their next generation game engine. What other game developers are using AMD-64 technology?

Henri Richard: I think developers will move very aggressively into 64-bit because it’s such a competitive software industry. I mean it’s really cutthroat, and you will see some of the big titles like Unreal, like Far Cry that are going to be out there and people are going to see the improvement in both texture and artificial intelligence that the AMD-64 environment provides and you’ll have to switch. So some folks are more aggressive than others, but again as I told you the transition to the 64-bit development environment is so painless, it’s really very simple. So my expectation is that by next Christmas all of the key editors, all of the people that really make the game software industry, will have some level of their library of titles that are either optimized or completely ported to AMD-64. I have yet to meet any of the big leaders in the game industry that have turned down the value of AMD-64.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of our interview with AMD’s Henri Richard, topics discussed include Athlon 64 pricing, AMD’s future plans, the 0.09-micron transition next year, and Windows 64-bit! FiringSquad would like to thank Brenda Rarick and Damon Muzny of AMD’s PR department for granting us this interview as well as Henri Richard for taking the time out of his busy schedule to chat with us for the interview. We asked a lot of questions and he tackled every one of them!



SIDEBAR: Multi-core processors, Hyper-Threading, the Athlon 64 FX versus Pentium 4 Extreme Edition battle – there are lots of potential topics to chat about in the news comments!