During today's analyst day event, AMD's executives provided an update on the company's plans and priorities for the years to come. The company provided details on the ZEN and Carrizo x86 chips, the ARM-based K12 and announced the new Radeon M300 series GPUs.

During the last three years, AMD's focus has been gradually transitioned from computing and graphics segment to enterprise, embedded and semi-custom segments. According to Lisa Sue, AMD's president and CEO, the company is challenged by a weak PC market, a market share loss (consumer PCs, desktop graphics and server) along with "not sufficiently focused" investments. For 2H 15, AMD expects to return to profitability (~$800M-$1B) due to seasonal sales improvement in PC/game consoles, the demand for Windows 10 and new product ramps.

"We see strong long-term growth opportunities across a diverse set of markets for the kind of high-performance compute and visualization capabilities only AMD can provide," said AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "We are focusing our investments on our strongest opportunities to enable our customers to create great products that push the boundaries of what is possible and allow AMD to achieve profitable growth in the years to come."

AMD sees growth opportunities and plans to invest in Gaming, Immersive Platforms (IoT connected devices, VR/AR devices) and Datacenter/Infrastructure (high-performance x86 and ARM CPUs, GPU compute, Security, Enterprise class development) markets in the years to come. The latter will be driven by technology, with AMD relying on their future Zen (x86) and K12 (ARM) CPUs to help improve their competitive positioning.

The company has a strong graphics IP portfolio, powerful silicon, and they are already in everything from casinos to high-end PCs, and everything in between. AMD is also banking on virtual reality through technologies such as LiquidVR.

AMD will also increase its investment in x86 chips but also deliver focused investments in ARM chips and also simplify its roadmap. On the other hand, AMD will not invest in IoT Endpoints, low-End Tablets/Mobile, smartphones.

The company offered a brief update on the state of Carrizo, the company’s forthcoming next-generation mobile APU. Due for launch this year, AMD has just confirmed that Carrizo is ramping well and will be launching this quarter.

The Carrizo notebooks will be known as the 6th generation A-series, and will be featuring revised AMD badges. AMD will be retaining the current FX/A10/A8 branding, with the only real change being the inclusion of the "6th generation" branding on the badges.

The problem is that AMD is once again launching a 28nm notebook APU versus Intel’s 14nm notebook CPUs. The company obviously banking on its GPU strong performance, coupled with the combination of low power optimizations and full fixed-function hardware decoding of HEVC.

AMD also annopunced the 7000 Series Accelerated Processing Units (APUs). Formerly codenamed "Carrizo-L" and part of the "Carrizo" platform in the 2015 AMD Mobile APU family roadmap, the mainstream system-on-a-chip (SoC) 7000 Series APUs are now available in Greater China and rolling out globally. These APUs combine a power-efficient CPU, an advanced GPU, an AMD Secure Processor and system I/O on a single energy efficient chip to prolong battery life and enable video streaming. Notebooks and All-in-Ones featuring new AMD 7000 Series support DirectX 12 and Microsoft's upcoming Windows 10 operating system.

Continuing with the "ZEN" core, a be totally new high-performance Core Design for both servers and desktops. Available next year, it is said to offer significantly higher performance, on the order of a 40% increase in Instruction Per Clock (IPC) throughput. Zen will also shift from Bulldozer’s Clustered Multithreading (CMT) to Simultaneous Multithreading. AMD is also labeling Zen’s cache as a "high-bandwidth, low latency cache system," without providing further details.Its energy-efficient FinFET design will scale from client to enterprise-class products.

Zen CPU will also use a new AMD platform – AM4 – which will also support DDR4.

In addition, AMD’s roadmap for Zen over 2016-2017 calls for further improved Zen cores, "Zen+".

AMD hopes that ZEN will put competition back into high-performance x86 CPU Market.

But the most interesting comments were related to the ARM K12, the AMD-developed ARM CPU core being designed alongside Zen. K12 has been pushed back from 2016 to 2017. AMD says the K12 will extend ARM to new server and embedded applications and performance levels. The company also says that virtually everything AMD gets right with Zen will be integrated into K12 as well, just on the basis of the ARM ISA instead of x86.

Along with updating their x86 and CPU roadmaps, AMD has also offered a brief update on their GPU roadmap.

2016 will be the year of FinFET across AMD, both for the CPU and GPU. Just like Zen, AMD will have GPUs on an unnamed FinFET process in 2016. AMD says that the combination of the 2016 architecture and the use of FinFET will result in a 2x improvement in energy efficiency over what AMD is calling their "previous generation GPU". AMD did not disclose which fab will be building this GPU, however the timeframe is such that it lines up with TSMC’s 16nm FinFET plans, with TSMC being AMD’s traditional fab of choice for GPUs.

AMD has also confirmed that they will be shipping GPUs with High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) technology. HBM involves stacking DRAM dies on top of each other, and then locating them next to or on top of a processor, the close proximity allowing for a high bandwidth memory bus. HBM should better than triple their memory perf-per-watt compared to GDDR5, with a better than 50% reduction in power consumption.AMD plans to introduce this packaging solution this year with its latest GPU.

AMD expects to be the first vendor to deploy HBM. So we should be looking at a launch of an HBM-equipped video card sooner than NVIDIA’s Pascal, which was previously announced to be using the same technology.

In addition, AMD highlighted its new high-performance network-on-chip (NoC) technology, a modular design approach that leverages re-usable IP building blocks to maximize design efficiency. This breakthrough design approach is expected to lower cost and time-to-market for both AMD's standard and future semi-custom products.

AMD has also slipped today the Radeon M300 series. The new GPUs are based on the AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) Architecture, which offers full support for DirectX 12, while also offering intelligent power technologies utilizing AMD Enduro Technologies. The company noted that M300 systems should already be available from several of AMD’s usual partners, including Alienware, HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Toshiba.

Additionally, AMD announced the availability of AMD Radeon 300 series desktop graphics, available only through OEMs. The AMD Radeon 300 Series GPUs feature AMD's GCN Architecture with full support for DirectX 12. Designs are currently shipping from HP plus additional OEMs shipping soon.

AMD will also launch new desktop GPUs this quarter. Information is very limited -- the new products will support DirectX 12, will support High Bandwidth Memory, LiquidVR acceleration features, along with AMD’s latest color compression technology.

Datacenter roadmap

AMD’s datacenter plans for the next couple of years will see AMD taking a three-pronged approach to the market. On the CPU side, AMD will of course be leveraging their forthcoming x86 Zen and ARM K12 CPU designs in serer versions.

AMD's next-generation AMD Opteron processors, based on the "Zen" core, will target mainstream servers that will enable a broad spectrum of workloads with increases in I/O and memory capacity.

AMD said its "Seattle" SoC – the ARM Cortex-A57 powered Opteron A1100 – will finally be shipping in H2 of this year, after first sampling towards the end of last year.

AMD’s GPU/APU plans in the datacenter space include a "high-performance server APU" targeting HPC and workstation markets. Not much details were provided here, rather than it will be a multi-teraflops chip intended to deliver improvements to vector applications with scale-up graphics performance, HSA enablement, and optimized memory architecture.