After watching a TED talk from Hector Ruiz, former head of AMD, I was provoked into doing a little research on the 50×15 initiative. I should briefly explain that this is a project that aims to help to connect 50% of the world connected to the Internet by 2015 by implementing solutions based on AMD products. Rather than having purely charitable aims, it does target upcoming nations as a business opportunity but its overriding aim is to do so in a seemingly responsible manner by targeting useful solutions to the needs of developing countries.

During the talk Ruiz mulls over the state of Internet connectivity in the world with some help from the great Gapminder data representations and reflects on how AMD technology can help to develop nations.

So what does this mean for UpStream, and why am I being so negative about the whole scheme? Well, for a start the project is interesting to us because to get more people connected you need to provide them with a means of doing so. For us this argument breaks down twofold into the terminals that a user will engage with day to day and the back-end services part of whose job is to provide an Internet connection which is sustainable financially.

We have already demonstrated swathes of research into low-power platforms, then put into place a method by which to use them in the most effective way for a mobile deployment. Equally, we also have research which is currently being considered into the concept of a Mobile ISP which would leverage some of the same hardware principles. A chip company like AMD offering alternatives in these streams is not competition, it’s just very good news as it should help us all achieve positive progress sooner.

Moving into more technical waters the negativity of my post becomes a little easier to understand. You see, Hector’s talk was back in June 2007, and the 50×15 project itself was founded in 2004. One of the major citations he makes during the presentation is that of the OLPC project which currently uses a low powered 433 MHz AMD Geode LX-700 CPU within its first generation design. Back in the technical research into AMD developed <15W platforms I slammed the Geode for providing woeful performance compared to Atom based systems but that’s perhaps not fair when we look at the context of an OLPC which is intended to fit into a ~5W average power envelope. However, the writing is on the wall for your product when the OLPC project looks towards ARM to provide the chips for their next hardware generation.

The natural question is to ask what AMD intend to do fend off the exciting ARM designs on the horizon or even compete with the slightly higher powered Poulsbo/Atom based solution we have praised. Well, for a start, the work on any further <5W Geode chips appears to have completely been abandoned post-2003, perhaps since Intel began to press home their advantage in more mainstream markets. The architecture simply has not been developed for years (arguably since Cyrix laid the foundations) and AMD have absolutely nothing waiting in the wings to offer improved performance with similar power characteristics. Now, that’s not conjecture, it’s fact. If AMD had such a part they would be producing millions of them and attempting to take on the Atom within the lucrative netbook market. Instead, they are targeting a space between netbooks and fully fledged PCs, and offering a CPU that trades blows in the much higher ~15W bracket.

Source: ExtremeTech

~15W does not compete with ~1-5W AMD - I’m sure you don’t need me to point this out. Your archaic offerings in that sector are vastly inferior compared principally to the new generation of ARM chips, and secondarily to more specialised iterations of the Atom. A simple glance at the 50×15 product portfolio bears this out without much analysis due to the slew of products aimed at purely thin-client deployments (ThinCan, Wyse), those which can’t even handle the most basic of media roles (Inveneo Computing Station, Linutop, Fic 603) or those which eschew power-consumption concerns in favour of a purely cost-cutting focus (HCL, DTK, Lenovo).

In short AMD, I think that you’re going to have to embrace the big blue or a certain British chip designer if you want to meet your aims in the best way possible, which for all your words is not something you will ever contemplate doing. If AMD are not bringing the CPUs then what’s their role or indeed business model? Because I think it leaves them bereft of one.

To finish I want to underline that when I write articles like this I do so with no bias, in the same state of mind as if I was building myself a new PC. I look at what technology is out there to fit my needs, and I look at key factors like price, performance and functionality which will ultimately sway my decision. As a fan of the underdog I would love AMD to compete in this space but they seem to have entirely relinquished their role in powering any computationally meaningful ultra low power devices. How can a company who have no products aimed at <15W TDP hope to achieve such a lofty ambition? Come back AMD, because Intel & ARM need you to keep them innovative, and Ruiz’s 50×15 initiative doesn’t deserve to slip away. Sadly, the longer AMD refrain from re-entering the market the more laughable their fringe schemes like 50×15 which depend on bleeding-edge products seem.