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."
The fat lady is singing (Score:2, Interesting)
Can we see (Score:5, Interesting)
I can see this being a remarkable selling point for Windows devices if both ARM and x86 code can execute on the same device without emulation.
This is interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
x86/AMD64 is overkill for many server functions.
It will be interesting to see if chips appear optimized for different functions.
For example hardware sql accelerators or massive i/o for file serving.
Since many hardware raid controllers are nothing but ARM cores anyway it would be interesting to see multiple cores, some used as RAID controllers and some more advanced cores for the os and file serving with a 10GB lan controller all on one chip.
Add power, drives and Ram and have a killer file server.
Welcome to the club (Score:2, Interesting)
Welcome to the club, AMD !
Unlike the X86 community, there are so many more competitors in the ARMs camp - companies such as TI and Broadcom from USA, Samsung from Korea, Hitachi from Japan, Allwinner from China, which produces $7 ARM-based SoCs.
AMD, you can't even compete against ONE company in the x86 arena - Intel.
Are you sure you can complete against the whole slew of them, this time??
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Intel (Score:2, Interesting)
I wouldn't be surprised at all if Intel had a team working on ARM ISA designs as a contingency plan, but I highly doubt they'd transition to ARM unless x86 was facing virtual annihilation. They're well aware that if they start releasing ARM chips, the whole industry will much more quickly transition away from x86. There's no way they would willingly destroy their extremely profitable, high-margin x86 business.
Re:Intel (Score:3, Interesting)
Intel will be doing the same thing in 3... 2... 1... Just like missing the 64-bit era with Itanium, it is missing he mobile era with Atom.
What are you even talking about? Since when did Intel miss the "64 bit era" as you put it? Sure, Itanium was a failure and Intel sunk billions of dollars trying to make it work. However, Intel could afford that mistake and still continue chugging along. As things stand today, Intel absolutely dominates the 64 bit market. In fact, except for Intel, AMD, and the IBM Power chips, there is no other game in town as far as 64 bit is concerned, and in this market, Intel probably has 80% or 90% market share, and has the best performance and performance per watt numbers.
So, I'm not sure which 64 bit era you are talking about, and how Intel missed it.
As far as Atom is concerned, yes, Intel is struggling quite a bit. However, Intel is trying to scale down its power consumption while ARM is trying to scale up its performance. Sooner or later, the two shall meet and it will be a very interesting battle. I wouldn't write off Intel so soon yet. In fact, the upcoming Clovertrail based Windows 8 tablets should be a very interesting launch. Take a look at the Thinkpad Tablet 2 for example. It should be a very interesting tablet for corporate customers or for users who want x86 along with Windows 8 Pro along with 3G and LTE mobility and a full-size USB port and with 8-9 hrs battery life.
I'm not saying Intel will win or lose, and it needs be relentless in improving power efficiency to even be a viable alternative to ARM. However, to say that Atom has already lost the race is a bit premature.
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:AMD might stand a chance (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe the new direction is going to be heterogeneous computing. We're already seeing AMD and Intel combine x86 and a GPU on one die; maybe AMD will try to combine everything and have a couple of ARM cores for low-power tasks, a couple of Bulldozer modules for more intensive tasks, all combined with their GPU.
ARM64 + Hypertransport = Interesting Outlook (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact AMD has an amazing technology portfolio. Having graphics chip (ATI Division), the hypertransport technology and AMD64, we can expect some interesting developments
Re:ARM64 + Hypertransport = Interesting Outlook (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember when AMD bought ATI many years ago... everybody (including us Slashdot posters) were saying what a bone-headed waste of money that was.
Now everybody's saying AMD is really fucked except for one bright spot which is its graphics division....
Re:Welcome to the club (Score:4, Interesting)
Sadly the systems I work on are all Intel because we do a great deal of report and post-processing on data and that requires CPU grunt and running as much as we can in parallel. Had AMD done this they would have been under consideration. Hyper-threading makes very little if any difference to us really, it's all about getting as many full cores on as possible.
Re:Welcome to the club (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess you take the words of Intel fanboys literally. No, the Bulldozer architecture is not hyper-threading. No, it does not mean only a slight performance gain and especially not a performance loss. I recently made 3 microbenchmarks on an Opteron 6234 (Bulldozer too). I measured the negative effect of sharing some circuits in a Bulldozer core. This negative effect varies from insignificant to small (3%, 13%, 25%). I run the same two threads on the two cores of a single bulldozer unit vs two cores on separate units. Intel hyper-threading brings 30% more performance - in the best case. The bulldozer core pair brings 75% more performance - in the worst case. How can you compare them? They are not in the same league.
The funniest benchmark was the floating point. The most frequent complaint against the Bulldozer architecture is that two cores share a single floating point unit. AMD should tell one million times that yes, they share a single floating point unit, but that is a 256 bit wide unit, which can be split into two 128 bit parts. And what is the size of the usual floating point number? Not 256 bit, not 128 bit, but only 64. In reality I measured that the two cores in a single unit processes floating point instructions almost at full speed. The negative effect of circuit sharing was only 3%, barely measurable. How ironic.
Re:Originally designed for mobile phones??? (Score:4, Interesting)
They were designed for low power operation because the engineers were impressed with the 6502's efficiency.
Nope. They were designed for low power so that they could use cheap plastic packaging instead of expensive ceramic packaging.