AMD's Hester touts PC, graphics convergence

AMD had a great year in 2006, using its success with the Opteron server processor to win greater respect from users -- and troubled rival Intel. But tumbling chip prices and a new crop of Intel products have put new pressure on the company. On Tuesday, AMD's Chief Technology Officer Phil Hester talked with IDG News Service during the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. He spoke about trends in new technologies he was seeing on the show floor, the progress of AMD's acquisition of ATI, and the new technologies that are needed to deliver the long-promised goal of sharing Internet and television content between devices.

IDGNS: I was talking to your colleagues at ATI about the TV Wonder [a digital cable tuner] and your own initiatives with AMD Live, and it seems like you're both working on similar approaches. Is there overlap between the platforms in areas like content security or Vista?

Hester: My perception is that video content owners have learned a lot from the audio content owners, and there's a lot of concern and focus on the whole issue of end-to-end content protection, particularly when it comes to bringing HD (high-definition) content. Standard-definition content people are pretty comfortable, but the issue is with premium content. We'll see a big improvement around DRM (digital rights management) with Vista. Combined with a PC, it will make the set-top box a more secure environment, so now with Vista, you've got a platform for premium cable. It has a natural ability to do DRM and use 3D graphics for the user interface.

Essentially every client you see now is going to have a decent level of 3D graphics capability. If you went back to the early PC platforms in the mid-1980s with the 286 generation, you had an open socket next to it for the 287 math coprocessor, and at that time, a very small fraction of the population ever bought that math coprocessor because the applications didn't demand it. The same thing happened with the 386 processor, although you had 20 percent of people using it. And then the 486 integrated that as a standard part of every microprocessor, driven by the fact that the operating system and the applications demanded it.

I think the same thing now is happening with 3D graphics. If you look at the things driving that, whether it's business information rendering or entertainment, by the 2009 time frame, just about every PC is going to have to have some level of 3D graphics. Not just the top end of the enthusiast market, but it is going to be a standard PC experience without having to incur the cost and efficiency hit of using a separate graphics card.

If you look at the [CES] show here, to me this is kind of a proof point -- there's a convergence of traditional consumer media streams in the PC. You go out and look at all the 1080p HD TVs and the interactive multimedia technologies that are present and all the capability of some of the gaming platforms, you recognize that the PC was never really architected to deal with that. So over time, GPUs -- graphics processing units -- have been added to the PC to deal with these new types of data. But if you think about these new types of data becoming just as important as the standard data in the PC, you'll see you have got to rethink processing elements, taking the best of the information processing ability of the x86, 64-bit architecture and marrying that with the graphics capability of GPUs.