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While AMD will rely on Microsoft’s predictable, stable API, Huddy said, it will continue to innovate to respond to pressure high-end developers. “Direct X hardware does things in a highly predictable way, and it will continue to perform in a very predictable way from one generation to the next and from one vendor to the next,” he said. “If we want to innovate, and make our products better than previous generation, we need to figure out that pressure and handle it.”
Finally, as for the reference to Intel’s Larrabee x86 cores in last week’s interview – in which Huddy said the desire to go around APIs was responsible for the appeal of Larrabee -- Huddy said it allowed Intel the freedom AMD has to write and publish their drivers and give them to developers in source form. “From a game developer’s perspective, it offered really low-level control of hardware, and that’s very attractive to a small group of developers,” he said. “Intel found a couple of problematic things, however. They found that building a GPU is really hard, that it requires a tremendous amount of expertise and experience to make GPUs as efficient as they are on the extraordinary scale that AMD makes them, and they found that writing drivers is hard as well.”
Huddy added that part of what gets in the way isn’t just Direct X or any other API, it can also be AMD’s driver. “It’s very hard to build a driver that’s very fast,” he said. “There are two difficulties: the software and the hardware. But philosophically it’s possible.”
Robison added that despite the philosophical advantage, Larrabee is the kind of product AMD would not offer. “Larrabee was horribly inefficient,” he said. “It required an unbelievable amount of power and offered very little value. There would not be any possibility of a product like Larrabee succeeding in the marketplace.”
Despite the need to put ‘pressure’ on Microsoft, Robison added that AMD sees Microsoft’s Direct X product quite differently. “We’re simply letting Microsoft know the feedback we get from game developers,” he said. “We’ve heard from the high-end and the low-end. The very high-end want something more in terms of performance. That’s information we give to Microsoft. They’ve done a tremendous job continuing to innovate with Direct X. Game developers, AMD and Nvidia offer constructive feedback because we want to see them continue to innovate.”
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