AMD announces NILE line of CPU platform

Hemlock is coming next week

AMD surely pull this one on NVIDIA. At a recent announcement, Advanced Micro Devices, the second largest processor player in the world after Intel, announced that the Hemlock high-end graphics card are due next week and also their third-generation ultra-thin laptop technology.

"Hemlock will get launched next week," said AMD Senior Vice President Rick Bergman, "It's in production. You'll be able to buy it at e-tailers around the world. You can see there are two GPUs. Five Teraflops out of this baby," he said. The Hemlock consists of the HD 5900 series of GPU.

Not only GPUs, AMD's third-generation "Nile" ultra-thin laptop platform are also long due, and was discussed in the same conference. Another technology dubbed "Danube" will also come out next year. Danube will be AMD's first quad-core laptop platform and support both Windows 7 DirectCompute technology and Apple's OpenCL. Both these platforms support DirectX 10.1 and can be upgraded to support DirectX with one of three Manhattan GPUs - Park, Madison and Broadway. Following NVIDIA’s strategy, AMD is also planning to first shrink the 40nm platforms to 32nm, and then start making 32nm processors independently. NVIDIA is expected to do the same with its 40nm platforms in 2010.

2011 will see the debut of AMD’s true 32nm platform Fusion, which combines the main processor with the graphics chip. "First Fusion processor in 2011 will be 32-nanometer quad-core. Leveraging (Windows 7) DX-11 graphics," Bergman said. AMD is currently moving to 45-nanometer technology.

Also the brand new restructured x86 chips called Bulldozer will be rolled out in 2011.