AMD Says It's 'Ambidextrous,' Hints It May Offer ARM Chips 140
J. Dzhugashvili writes "Today at its Financial Analyst Day, AMD made statements that strongly suggest it plans to offer ARM-based chips alongside its x86 CPUs and APUs. According to coverage of the event, top executives including CEO Rory Read talked up an 'ambidextrous' approach to instruction-set architectures. One executive went even further: 'She said AMD will not be "religious" about architectures and touted AMD's "flexibility" as one of its key strategic advantages for the future.' The roadmaps the execs showed focused on x86 offerings, but it seems AMD is overtly setting the stage for a collaboration with ARM."
Re:PowerPC (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:at last! (Score:4, Insightful)
*BUT*, there comes a massive performance penalty which is that the clock rate now has to be twice as fast as a RISC processor in order to achieve the same results.
That's just complete bollocks.
A modern x86 processor (meaning... since the Pentium Pro in the mid 90s) is, internally, a RISC-like core with full OoO execution and so on and so forth.
Variable instruction decode is a pain in the ass and does add latency in the front end. This isn't great, but it is nowhere near a 50% reduction in IPC. Try more like 1-2% (measured via correlated cycle-accurate performance simulator), depending on how clever you get and in any case easily made up for by a clever widget or two.
Basically predictions of RISC eating x86 for breakfast were made over 15 years ago and never came to pass. Mostly by x86 morphing so that the difference was essentially irrelevant.
Your talk about northbridges sounds woefully out of date, too. This has nothing to do with ISA, and both major x86 vendors now have integrated northbridges.
You're closer to reality when talking about power. Regardless of the small IPC penalty, those decoders burn up a lot of power. There are ways to get around this, too, and for moderate perf moderate low power x86 does just fine. At the very low end of power, though, going to something like ARM makes sense.
Re:let's hope that... (Score:5, Insightful)
"The problem with ARM is there are literally millions of x86 programs that have become an integral part of peoples lives"
Not really. There are many ARM programs that have become and integral part of people lives. Android and IOS are two big example not to mention the apps that run on them.
Software is not as locked to an ISA as it once was. Microsoft and Apple have shown that with the move of Windows to ARM and the move of OS/X to x86.
Applications are not written in assembly anymore they are written in C++ or another high level language. Take your example of Photoshop? Moving Photoshop from Windows to Windows on ARM is probably a much simpler project a Windows and OS/X version. The same is true of Office.
I do think that AMDs Fusion is interesting but your reasoning on why people will keep use the x86 is not valid. They will only keep using x86 for as long as that is the best solution. IMHO x86 is endanger of being the next PDP-11 or VAX unless it can scale down to mobile and fast.
RAD6000 / RSC / POWER1 (Score:4, Insightful)
RSC(POWER1) is the most popular CPU architecture on Mars, and possibly in the solar system outside of Earth.