AMD chief: 'Core wars are misdirected'

AMD 's chief technologist has slammed the so-called 'core wars' between his company and Intel. In an interview featured in the latest PC Plus magazine, chief technology officer Phil Hester says the "whole 'core wars' thought is as misdirected as the megahertz wars were".

Yet he's enthusiastic about AMD's multi-core future. "What you'll see us provide is heterogeneous processors that really focus on a whole wide range of applications that enthusiasts can take advantage of.

What we have coming is a native quad-core. We didn't take two dual-cores and stuff them together - that's what Intel did." And, taking another swing at Intel, Hester added "core for the core's sake to us has no purpose."

During the interview in the September edition of the magazine, Hester talks in depth about the company's future technology roadmap as well as discussing the motives behind the ATI acquisition.

He also talks up AMD's "future vision" for processors and its hopes for harnessing the power of graphics processing to ease the dependency on the CPU. "If you look at a PC today, and you look at the graphics subsystem, graphics are equally important, if not more important today than the x86 processor for general purpose instruction processing," he says.

Fusion the next stage

"The GPU is starting to become a much more general computing component as opposed to something that only deals with graphics. Because it was created as a specialised processing unit, it wasn't really thought about as a general computing resource.

"By putting the CPU and GPU together on the same chip, you can solve a lot of the efficiency elements because the data now stays on the chip and not off chip," Hester added, with AMD's forthcoming Fusion processor developments in mind.

Hester as been at AMD for a year. Prior to this he spent some time running a start-up and had 23 years at IBM. He revealed to PC Plus that he thinks Intel was taken aback by AMD's acquisition of ATI. "I think Intel was thoroughly surprised by what was going on."

And of ATI's competitor? "Nvidia is a partner of ours, it continues to be a partner, and we're not trying to block it out... We are not in the Intel school of thought that says we are going to tell you every single chipset vendor that you have to have in order to qualify for a sticker. We think that is a fundamental mistake."

Read the full interview in the September (259) issue of PC Plus out now, priced £4.99.

Contributor

Dan (Twitter, Google+) is TechRadar's Former Deputy Editor and is now in charge at our sister site T3.com. Covering all things computing, internet and mobile he's a seasoned regular at major tech shows such as CES, IFA and Mobile World Congress. Dan has also been a tech expert for many outlets including BBC Radio 4, 5Live and the World Service, The Sun and ITV News.

Latest in Tech
Josie and Matt laughing in front of the Google Pixel 9a
TechRadar Podcast: Is the Pixel 9a ugly? Has Apple ruined the smartwatch market? And is Samsung's One UI in trouble?
A Lego Pikachu tail next to a Pebble OS watch and a screenshot of Assassin's Creed Shadow
ICYMI: the week's 7 biggest tech stories from LG's excellent new OLED TV to our Assassin's Creed Shadow review
A triptych image of the Meridian Ellipse, LG C5 and Xiaomi 15.
5 amazing tech reviews of the week: LG's latest OLED TV is the best you can buy and Xiaomi's seriously powerful new phone
Beats Studio Pro Wireless Noise Cancelling Headphones in Black and Gold on yellow background with big savings text
The best Beats headphones you can buy drop to $169.99 at Best Buy's Tech Fest sale
Ray-Ban smart glasses with the Cpperni logo, an LED array, and a MacBook Air with M4 next to ecah other.
ICYMI: the week's 7 biggest tech stories from Twitter's massive outage to iRobot's impressive new Roombas
A triptych image featuring the Sennheiser HD 505, Apple iPad Air 11-inch (2025), and Apple MacBook Air 15-inch (M4).
5 unmissable tech reviews of the week: why the MacBook Air (M4) should be your next laptop and the best sounding OLED TV ever
Latest in News
Nintendo Switch 2 Joy-Con up-close from app store
Nintendo's new app gave us another look at the Switch 2, and there's something different with the Joy-Con
cheap Nintendo Switch game deals sales
Nintendo didn't anticipate that Mario Kart 8 Deluxe was 'going to be the juggernaut' for the Nintendo Switch when it was ported to the console, according to former employees
Three angles of the Apple MacBook Air 15-inch M4 laptop above a desk
Apple MacBook Air 15-inch (M4) review roundup – should you buy Apple's new lightweight laptop?
Witchbrook
Witchbrook, the life-sim I've been waiting years for, finally has a release window and it's sooner than you think
Amazon Echo Smart Speaker
Amazon is experimenting with renaming Echo speakers to Alexa speakers, and it's about time
Shigeru Miyamoto presents Nintendo Today app
Nintendo Today smartphone app is out now on iOS and Android devices – and here's what it does