It was a veritable smörgåsbord of AMD information yesterday as vendors revealed the EOL schedule for a suite of CPUs and AMD Japan introduced the firm’s platform roadmap throughout 2011.

Kicking off the information dump, Digitimes assembled an end-of-life schedule for Phenom/Athlon II CPUs on the word of motherboard vendors. These dates are not when the CPUs will no longer be available in stores, but rather when they will no longer be sold to channel partners. One can imagine that the retail stocks will remain healthy for a while after channel sales end, but the CPUs are as good as gone within a quarter. Vendors also put their two cents in to confirm prior speculation that AMD was preparing a hexa-core desktop chip, codenamed Thuban.

On the platform front, Japanese tech blog plaza.rakuten.co.jp has leaked slides of an AMD roadmap presentation which detailed the company’s efforts throughout 2011. On the desktop front, we have the following:

Leo

Purpose: Enthusiast desktop
Date: 1H10
Chipset: RD890 northbridge, SB800 series southbridge
CPU: Thuban (Six cores, 2.8GHz, 512k exclusive L2, 6MB shared L3, 40nm, socket AM3)
GPU: Radeon HD 5000 series

Aside from the previously-mentioned Thuban CPU, the Leo platform is significant in that the RD800/SB800 chipset combo is the first major update to AMD’s chipsets since November 2007. The company launched the 790FX chipset that year, and it’s still the most feature-rich chipset in the company’s stable. The company has released several subsequent derivatives of the 790FX, but it’s still the cream of the crop. The RD/SB800 combo rights that madness by kicking the HyperTransport frequency up to 4000MHz, adding optional support for SATA 6Gbps, and enhancing power savings. We can only imagine that USB 3.0 support won’t be far behind as an add-in ASIC at the discretion of mobo vendors.

Scorpius

Purpose: Enthusiast desktop
Date: 2011
Chipset: RD890 northbridge, SB800 series southbridge
CPU: Zambezi (>4 processing cores, 32nm, new architecture)
GPU: Northern Islands

Into 2011, the roadmap gets more nebulous as AMD keeps many of its cards close to its chest for the sake of competition. First we see that AMD is carrying their 2010 chipset launch into 2011, which should bode well for motherboard prices. More importantly, we see that AMD has given us a codename for an actual CPU inside the long-awaited Bulldozer family of processors.

Bulldozer has been discussed since 2007 as AMD’s first new architecture since the introduction of the Phenom II family. Zambezi is a 32nm part that we can presume is designed to compete with Intel’s new Sandy Bridge architecture which is set to debut on the same process node in the same time frame. Rumors persistently flag Zambezi as an octo core part, and that’s not an unreasonable guess given the firm’s plans to go dodeca core on the larger 45nm node in 2010.

We also see that the “Hecatonchires” rumors for AMD’s next-gen Radeon parts have come up bust. The real codename for the 5000 series’ successor is Northern Islands, and it will no doubt include a complete range of enthusiast and mid-range parts much like we see with the newest Radeons.

Lynx

Purpose: Mainstream desktop
Date: 2011
Chipset: Hudson-D southbridge
CPU: Llano (Up to 4 cores, 32nm, integrated GPU, Phenom II-based)
GPU: Northern Islands

AMD’s mainstream market sees continued support for the Stars family of architectures, which includes products like the Phenom II X4 and the Phenom II X3. The most notable event in this segment doesn’t come until 2011 when AMD finally introduces the Llano APU, or a processor with on-die graphics. Llano is said to be a 32nm Northern Islands core married to a 32nm die shrink of the Phenom II.

Migrating the PCIe lanes onto the CPU as Intel has done with the Lynnfield processor also allows AMD to do away with the northbridge, just like Intel did with the P55 chipset. This explains the lonely existence of the Hudson-D southbridge, and it should also make for dirty cheap mainboards.

The company has talked about this type of solution under the “Fusion” branding as far back as 2006. The Fusion branding has since evolved to embody AMD’s platform-oriented market presence, but it’s good to see the original definition finally make an appearance.

Mobile segment

Mobile solutions for the boys in green take a note from the mainstream and carry the Stars architecture deep into 2011. The company is preparing a complete lineup of fully-featured and ultra thin products including Congo, Tigris, Danube and Nile, all of which we touched on in our forward look at AMD’s mobile strategy throughout the next few years.

AMD's lineup of desktop platforms throughout 2011. (Image credit: http://plaza.rakuten.co.jp)

In all it appears AMD is beginning an aggressive program to phase out the old stock of Phenom processors to make way for their new architecture in 2011. Between unexpected processor retirements and a fully-developed, concrete platform roadmap, it seems AMD is well prepared to execute on that strategy.