About a year ago, I predicted in a thread somewhere in this site that AMD would not put out an AM4 platform. Seems like I was right. They look to be trying to get HSA to replace the current cpu market. That is to say, if we manage to get HSA support in all software, then apus will be much faster than cpus, resulting in a movement away from the way things have been in the cpu market and a movement towards utilizing graphics processing more in every day tasks, and tasks generally delegated to the cpu. The cpu only segment appears to me to allow for some more wiggle room as the world isn't currently ready to move to apu only. Anyway, those are my predictions on what AMD is planning. Here is the article.
This is not a surprise. And i posted these Roadmaps this morning. lol AMD wants a unified Platform. i don't think the multi platform thing that Intel is doing isn't working for them.
Not surprising. AM3+ have some good motherboards but not a huge choice range like on lga 1150. Makes sense for them to try to get more motherboard choice available.
Yep! And its not that WCCFtech is necessarily bad, it just seems to be a nexus of rumors lately. (Tired of getting my hopes dashed!)
I hope that the last gasp of AM3+ 970 boards we have seen come out within the last six months are a sign of how FM3 is going to be. ASRock 970 Performance was a particularly impressive board, with three-way Crossfire, and M.2 interface, for just under $100 in a lot of places.
WCCFTech has gotten a ton of "leaks" in the past two weeks. I don't fully trust their content.
On the side of AMD switching to a unified platform, I'm not surprised in the least. By creating so many branches of different products in todays market with AM1, FM2+, AM3+, and G34 they have stretched a bit thin.
I hope with "FM3" they still have some very clear notations of what is performance level and what is mainstream, but for the most part I hope this is like AM3/AM2+ used to be. Everything from the lowest-end Sempron up to the highest end Phenom II fit the same socket, memory, chipset, and I/O. That worked before, and they want it to work again.
I don't expect G34 to disappear until AMD can come up with a proper replacement. Whether "FM3" will be capable in the server and HPC market is obviously still to be seen, as AMD themselves haven't actually said anything through official outlets.
Best keep all this hype and speculation to a minimum, Zen is still a year off. If you guys hype yourselves up too much you will end up disappointed. *cough* Bulldozer *cough*
Oh my god, I almost forgot about the AM1 platform! ( @Fouquin ) Didn't AMD already say they were going to drop that one like a wet sock? Part of me hopes put out a couple more products for that platform, because I am eternally a tinker, but I honestly have no clue if the platform is doing as well as they hoped it would.
AM1 is pretty good at being laptop-level performance/power usage in a dynamic desktop format. Also it's like $240 for a full AM1 machine. I guess it's HTPC and maybe NAS oriented, but I haven't seen any sales numbers. I assume it sells to a niche market, and so the sales are fairly low.
I know of two people who have purchase the system, just to be silly and try overclocking with it. (I think it is possible only on some Asus boards.) One is actually using the system as an HTPC, so that one kind of counts. shrugs I hope the market in Central America and India is doing well for it.
Kind of regressing to my first note, ASRock has been making some pretty interesting boards lately, in general. But, in relation to AMD, their high-end for the FM2+ platform was really good. I hope that FM3 is an amalgamation of what we saw with the A88X, and the last-gen AM3+ 970.
Its not like there was a chance of new cpus working on the ancient am3+ motherboards anyway. Besides this is good they can get to work on new things and not have to worry about if new things will work with old motherboards.
Good, having a unified socket is a good thing its working for intel it can work for amd too. the FM platform is pretty nice I think, plus its shown to support apu and normal cpu so making fm3 would be the best thing they could do.