AMD Announces First ARM Processor 168
MojoKid writes "AMD's Andrew Feldman announced today that the company is preparing to sample its new eight-core ARM SoC (codename: Seattle). Feldman gave a keynote presentation at the fifth annual Open Compute Summit. The Open Compute Project (OCP) is Facebook's effort to decentralize and unpack the datacenter, breaking the replication of resources and low volume, high-margin parts that have traditionally been Intel's bread-and-butter. AMD is claiming that the eight ARM cores offer 2-4x the compute performance of the Opteron X1250 — which isn't terribly surprising, considering that the X1250 is a four-core chip based on the Jaguar CPU, with a relatively low clock speed of 1.1 — 1.9GHz. We still don't know the target clock speeds for the Seattle cores, but the embedded roadmaps AMD has released show the ARM embedded part actually targeting a higher level of CPU performance (and a higher TDP) than the Jaguar core itself."
Despite it's name (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Despite it's name (Score:4, Informative)
Microsoft supports Windows, IIS, SQL Server, and Exchange on ARM. Linux and its FOSS supports ARM as well. I believe RHES has an openJDK for java apps to run on ARM servers too.
Besides a few niche apps I really do not see the application compatibility problem.
It is not like these are used to run win32 desktop apps.
Re:Despite it's name (Score:5, Informative)
Where you even came up with an idea like that is beyond me.
Obviously [wikipedia.org]. BTW, isn't tonight a school night, kid?
x86 IS efficient (Score:4, Informative)
Actually x86 IS efficient for for something completely different. The architecture itself is totally unimportant as deep inside it is yet another micro code translator and doesn't differ significantly from PPC or Sparc nowadays.
x86 short instructions allow for highly efficient memory usage and for a much, much, much higher Ops per Cycle. This is just that big of a deal that ARM has created a short command version of ARM opcodes just to close in. But then this instruction set is totally incompatible and also totally ignored.
Short instructions do not matter on slow architectures like todays ARM world. These just want to safe power and therefore it fits in well that ARM also is a heavy user of slow in-order-execution.
A nice example, increasing a 64 bit register in x86 takes ONE byte and recent x86 CPUs can run this operation on different register up to 100 times PER CYCLE, all commands to be loaded in THREE to EIGHT Cycles from memory to cache. On the other hand, the same operation on ARM takes 12 bytes for a single increment operation, to load some dozend of these operations would take THOUSANDS of clock cycles.
And now you know why high end x86 is 20-50 times faster than ARM.
Re:Why ARM? (Score:2, Informative)
power efficiency which is important in datacenters. electricity isnt free.
Re:Why ARM? (Score:2, Informative)
1) cheap
2) competition
3) custom SoCs
If that is enough to work out remains to be seen.