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ARM VP To Keynote AMD Developer Conference
MojoKid writes "AMD is hosting its first AMD Fusion Developer Summit (AFDS) this summer, from June 13-16. The conference will focus on OpenCL and upcoming AMD Llano performance capabilities under various related usage models. One interesting twist is that the keynote address will be given by Jem Davies, currently ARM's VP of technology. To date, AMD's efforts to push OpenCL as a programming environment have been limited, particularly compared to the work NV has sunk into CUDA. With its profit margins and sales figures improving, AMD is apparently turning back to address the situation — and ARM's a natural ally. The attraction of OpenCL is that it can potentially be used to improve handheld device performance. AMD's explicit mention of ARM hints that there might be more than meets the eye to this conference as well."
How about spending a few engineering dollars and releasing GOOD well documented drivers? I'm a regular reader of the XBMC forums and anyone that wants to use Linux more or less needs to buy Nvidia hardware.
I'm not in the 'anti-closed binary' camp, I just want the best tool for the job. Nvidia provides great CUDA and VDPAU support and it more or less 'just works'. ATI & Intel decided to jump on the Linux bandwagon by opening up everything and so far it seems like the community really hasn't jumped on it. I paid money for your hardware, why not pay an engineer to write software I can actually use?
When I go car shopping and the sales associate shows me 2 cars. One is completely built, works well enough and has good factory support BUT I'm not allowed to modify it. Or the second one which is actually just in a crate. It comes partially assembled... but don't worry. There is complete documentation for every single loose part and instructions on how to put it together. And the 2 cars cost nearly the same.
I'm going to choose the first car. My time IS worth something and I'd rather have something I can't modify but works great as is (NVidia's drivers) to something that really is useless unless I, or someone else, uses the documentation to do something (ATI). Especially when the hardware costs are nearly the same.
I've been hearing this drivel for years.
It's beaten out other techs for a reason. ARM is not replacing x86 on the desktop any time soon, thank goodness. Maybe joining it, but not replacing it.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Speaking to EE Times during a discussion of ARM's first quarter financial results CEO Warren East said: "AMD is a successful company selling microprocessors. ARM is in the business of licensing microprocessor designs. It is perfectly natural that we should have been trying to sell microprocessor designs to AMD for about the last ten years. Hitherto we haven't been successful." East also said: "AMD has signaled they are going through a rethink of their strategy, and that must provide a heightened opportunity for ARM. They might use ARM microprocessors in the future and you've got to expect that we would be trying to persuade them of that." http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4215518/ARM-working-on-AMD-to-drop-x86
No ARM Will not replace x86 on the desktop. They point is to keep x86 away from other platforms. The desktop is what it is, a swiss army knife where a powerful CPU with a big feature set is called for, because the system will do a little of everything. Its also true that different feature sets are needed by different users but packing it into a single one size fits all chip is the way to go because the incremental cost of adding features so won't use are less that making a wider array of products. Electrical efficiency is desirable but not at the cost of features or raw performance. Nothing but perhaps POWER will ever compete with x86 there.
x86 is ill suited to mobile devices for all the same reasons its great on desktops and laptops that can afford large heavy batteries, and are generally used where AC is available.
What AMD/Marvell/VIA/NVIDIA *need* to do is keep the old WinTel mind set and lock in out of these new devices. Which they can because they are more limited in scope, and most of the software for these things is already cross platform. Its a matter of keeping it that way so the market remains open and competitive.
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And the reason is Intel had the resources to make more of what they were selling than anybody else and other low end players could get better sales by copying them instead doing their own thing. Itanic was competing with Intel's core product and did not have a chance within Intel. Other places got bought out by other companies that didn't see anything past Intel making a lot of money. I've got no idea what IBM are doing with Cell - try to buy something with it and they tell you to get something else.
2012 will be the year of ARM on the desktop.
It's beaten out other techs for a reason. ARM is not replacing x86 on the desktop any time soon, thank goodness. Maybe joining it, but not replacing it.
And what do you think this reason is?
Hint: it's not technical superiority.
Phillip.
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Features of x86 that are currently missing in ARM? How about out-of-order execution,
The Cortex-A9 is out-of-order.
64-bit operation,
They indeed don't have 64 bit ALU or memory addressing support yet.
speed boost (some cores shut down to let other cores run faster),
That's unrelated to the architecture. And at least NVidia's Tegra dual-core cpu's shut down one of the two cores if it's not in use. I don't think they automatically overclock the other one to run faster when doing so though.
and a top-end speed around 3GHz just to name a few.
Yes, in absolute performance per core they are still trailing x86. I was mainly reacting to the "anorexic featureless simpleton CPU" remark with my question though.
Of course the lack of those features lets it run cooler which makes the ARM processor ideal for low-power applications like cell phones.
And server farms.
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With the plethora of JIT compiled languages doing high-end tasks today, and the increasing number of cross platform/arch libraries, I'm not sure that x86 compatibility is such a killer.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).