AMD Licenses 64-bit Processor Design From ARM 213
angry tapir writes "AMD has announced it will sell ARM-based server processors in 2014, ending its exclusive commitment to the x86 architecture and adding a new dimension to its decades-old battle with Intel. AMD will license a 64-bit processor design from ARM and combine it with the Freedom Fabric interconnect technology it acquired when it bought SeaMicro earlier this year."
Re:AMD might stand a chance (Score:4, Insightful)
If AMD can push their engineering into ARM quickly, they might not only stand a chance but they might dominate fairly quickly, I'd think. They're not on par with Intel on die size, but IIRC they're pretty close - that knowledge is certainly applicable.
Remember, they've got good GPUs already. A lot of what they tried to do with the Mobility and later generations were very "ARM-like" already, it just didn't exactly work due to x86 limitations. I'd think they've got a pretty good chance overall. (If anything, it's a big market. Tegra# are really pushing NVidia along, after all...)
Re:Welcome to the club (Score:5, Insightful)
Your facts are off two ways. First, going up against one big monopolistic company is a lot harder than going up against a lot of small ones. (Do you think it's easier to fight an elephant or a bunch of guys who are also fighting each other,) Second, they've managed to survive in the x86 market for 30 years. I think that counts as competing.
Re:Welcome to the club (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed. I am trying to grasp, somewhat desperately, the events that must have taken place inside AMD headquarters when the CPU design team said they wanted to do hyper-threading. Having seen how badly Intel got knocked around when they did it, and the fact that for the price of duplicating a fair amount of the CPU, you are still only occasionally eking out a slight performance gain...and sometimes, a performance loss, their strategy doesn't make sense. What was so hard about welding two Phenom II X6's together, using the hyperlinks already present in the CPU design, and calling it a day? Knowing full well that Intel wouldn't be able to compete with that design (they've been core adverse compared to AMD), being happy that all of the cores were full cores (who'd complain?), and that they'd be a hot item for system builders everywhere. Sure, some of the gaming websites like to barf about how single-threaded performance still matters, on some games that no one cares about (the GPU, of course, mattering a lot more than the single-threaded performance of a CPU here), but to take the advantage of having 6 full cores, and trade it in for 8 half-cores...was this some idiotic attempt at market segmentation? Did some moron in a suit have a brain fart, and think "we can't have 12-core Phenom IIIs, it will cannibalize our Opteron server sales"? Fire his ass, and cut the strings on his golden parachute on the way out.
For the life me, I just can't fathom how they turned a major market advantage, with the CPU design practically on the design table already, with a popular and critically acclaimed design, and decided that f*ck it, we're doing so well here, let's go for a lobotomy, and compete on Intel's turd with an unproven half-assed design. Let's go from a full-core design that everyone complements, to some terrible half-core design that nearly killed Intel at some point. Seriously, who is commanding AMD such that they were in their nappies when the whole Intel hyper-threading business was going down (which every half-decent tech knows about), and how did they get boardroom approval?
The proper response, of course, was not the Business School of Failure's attempt at mandating some perverse product differentiation, which bears as much similarity to surgery as bludgeoning a person to death with a hammer, but through true, non-crippling differentiation. Phenom IIIs get 12-cores, and the latest SSE instructions + something that the boys down in the instruction lab cook up; Opterons get larger caches + more cores + special server instruction sets that mean something concrete, even if it means implementing hardware Apache threads; that's on top of the SSE3 stuff and so forth. Would companies buy Opterons over Phenoms if one had hardware accelerated support for web services over the other? I believe the survey would say hell yes.
As for the GPU stuff, the low-cost, low-power stuff is nice for chump change, but it's a fierce market with many competitors. What you want, what large companies no doubt want, is the ability to slam in GPU-daughter boards, to add 10 or 20 7970 GPUs on a single board (preferably with sockets, which drives up the cost a few cents, but also taps into the smaller markets, where you may buy 4 GPUs now, and 6 later), so that they can drive those large super-computing projects that already make use of these GPUs, but do so more efficiently.
As for gaming, the more stream processors, I imagine, the better. When in doubt, double them, as it will give Intel and Nvidia something to curse over.
Re:The fat lady is singing (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. The one order the CEO can give to save the company is this: "Magical turn-arounds for companies who have been f*cked only happens in textbooks and fair-tales; as such, all resources for CPU design will go into creating a Phenom III with 12 cores and PCI-Express 3.0 and an Opteron design which employs liquid cooling (for the short term), as we are going to give it a major Mhz boost on top of the extra cores / cache we are going to staple on."
Getting involved in the already overgrown ARM market shows nothing but lack of vision. "We're going where everyone else is going, that'll be profitable!" You are going to be *that* guy who shows up late to the party, and wonders why all the booze is gone. Seriously, how do you mismanage stuff this badly? You're a CPU company, and you come up with the brilliant plan that despite being a major competitor in the x86 market, you're going to fix things by buying an oversubscribed design for a CPU in a market that...recursion error.
Think of it being like Ford, not using its own resources to think up a new car design, but paying Honda to license it the design for the Civic. Things are either absolutely atrocious, like AMD's stock should be worth a Haitian penny right now bad and we just haven't been told anything, or somebody doesn't know what he's doing. Go get the old guys your predecessor fired, and bring them back for more money. Find the DEC guys, and offer stock options if you have to to get them on board. Then follow their advice. After a year or two of punishment, AMD will be back on firm ground again.
Re:Welcome to the club (Score:5, Insightful)
Your argument doesn't stack up.
First you say they're bringing an 8 core chip to compete with a 4 core chip. Fine. Then you complain the cores cannot keep up 1:1. So you're expecting AMD's chips to be twice as good as intel's to be able to compete.
That, of course, is rigging the test, and so is dishonest.
One could also say that with single cores not much worse than the competition, but double the number of cores, and a lower price to boot, you get better value. Moreso if you can make good use of the double number of cores.
And that's before considering that single-core benchmarks are entirely unrepresentative for multi-core performance thanks to various tricks like turbo core and turbo boost — that aren't 1:1 comparable so you'd have to do full, sustained benchmarks on all cores simultaneously to find out which delivers the most sustained instructions per second.
Meaning that AMD's offering takes more marketing footwork, but technically is not all bad. Not at all.
NOTironic that Apple could very well be going back (Score:4, Insightful)
.
And considering what they'd been doing with Pink / Taligent in keeping a parallel universe of development of their codebase always going on the x86 architecture while publicly showing only PowerPC development, they've probably got a skunks-work factory team somewhere that's already been running ARM-based IOS or even ARM-based OSX for a year if not for years...