AMD Opens Israeli R&D Center, Hints At ARM Link

siliconbits writes "We've learnt that AMD will open a new research and development center in Israel in the Tel-Aviv area, one which will be built around Graphic Remedy, the small startup they purchased in September 2010 and which specialises in development tools for heterogeneous computing and 3D graphics. Although the chip company hasn't published any press releases yet, the news is a clear indication that AMD sees its future (and its survival) in a more fragmented market where x86 is no longer the dominating platform."

Comments

It's backwards day

[GameboyRMH]

Now Israel will be providing ARMs to the US for a change!

Israel has a lot more high tech than you expect

[Reverand Dave]

I worked in a semiconductor fab for a long time and we used AMAT SEM machines that were manufactured in israel. The direct factory reps were all israeli as well. A lot of people think of israel as this war-torn middle east wasteland but that's just not the case. It's a very wealthy and prosperous country, even if they are expanding and displacing the native populace. They are bringing a lot of non-oil money into the region.

Re:Israel has a lot more high tech than you expect

[the linux geek]

US aid to Israel is mostly spent in the US. Think of it as indirect job-creation money, just like most of the defense budget.

Re:Israel has a lot more high tech than you expect

[Monchanger]

You don't seem to understand Israel or the broken window fallacy.

Israel has real enemies who have been trying to invade them since independence. They will develop those arms, regardless of US support. This isn't wasteful spending, it's actually less wasteful than if they had to perform the R&D themselves, rather than purchase already-developed American goods. The US isn't encouraging Israel to buy stuff it wouldn't otherwise tax its citizens to obtain.

Argue about whether or not the US should support Israel if you must, but please try not to spread your ignorance.

Re:Israel has a lot more high tech than you expect

[superwiz]

US "foreign aid" to Israel is less than 5% of Israel's govt budget (not of GDP, but of govt budget!!!). Most of it consists of contractual obligations which were established as a result of the peace agreement negotiated by Carter. It might take some searching, but you can find the English version of their budget online. I did this during one of these exchanges a few years back.

Re:Yuck

[Anonymous Coward]

You can always buy any of the Palestinian designed CPUs out there.

Thanks, but I'll pass. I've heard the Palestinian CPUs have a tendency to overheat and blow themselves up, typically damaging other hardware components around them.

Re:Yuck

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

So you're fine buying from tech companies with Chinese factories (ie. pretty much all of them) but an Israeli R&D lab is unacceptable? I don't see the distinction.

Don't kid youself. None of those silicon-holding boxes you own were knitted by unicorns from a child's laughter.

Re:Yuck

[h4rr4r]

Maybe if a person considers Collective Punishment worse than low wages and unsafe working conditions it make sense. The latter seems pretty bad, but the former is a war crime.

Personally it all sounds pretty bad, and the other sides in the Isaeli-Arab conflicts aren't any better. I wish we could do without all of them.

OpenCL, not ARM Architecture

[TheRaven64]

Both AMD and ARM are pushing OpenCL in their GPUs. AMD is betting heavily on GPGPU, ARM has always been interested in offloading work to DSPs and suchlike in SoCs. This is nothing to do with AMD designing ARM chips in a post-x86 future, it's about both AMD and ARM emphasising GPU power over CPU power. AMD, because their GPUs are much faster than Intel's, and ARM because Atom (which loses quite badly on performance per Watt already) has no advantage over an ARM core in terms of raw performance if anything CPU-intensive is being offloaded to the GPU.

Re:Oh well

[cheeks5965]

I don't get it. Israel is generally considered a country in the middle east, not a part of South Africa from 20 years ago. The Oracle says:

Apartheid was a political system in South Africa, which was in use in the 20th century, mainly between the 1940s and the 1980s. In the system, the people of South Africa were divided by their race. Even though black people were the majority in the country, a small number of white people ruled them and held most political offices. There were laws that kept up the racial separation. The system of apartheid in South Africa was banned in 1994.

Ah.

[slasho81]

This explains the recruiting frenzy that Intel Israel has been in for last few weeks. They're drying up the employee market.

Re:Yuck

[Anonymous Coward]

iPads are actually knitted from children's laughter; the laughter is harvested in vast children farms on mainland China. Those children will never laugh again!

Re:Israel research talent

[derGoldstein]

I was looking over the comments to see if anyone was aware of this.

You're going to "shun" AMD products because they now have R&D facilities in Israel? If you avoided every product developed in Israel, you'd have almost nothing to "compute" with. It's not just semiconductor companies either -- Microsoft and Google have large setups in Israel as well. Facebook bought Snaptu a few months ago.

The Israeli economy is built around the tech sector.
Oh, and I'm Israeli, so don't forget to post some charming apartheid reply to this comment.

Re:Oh well

[derGoldstein]

How can you be a "democracy" when you deny full status to non-Jews?

Ignorance is far too rampant for me to make a dent, but I'll try:
- Arab population in Israel: 1,271,000 (about 20% of the population)
- 84.9% of Israeli Arabs stated that Israel has a right to exist as an independent state
- 77% would rather live in Israel as Israeli citizens than in any other country in the world
There are 14 arab members of parliament in the Israeli Knesset (out of 120 members total)

Feel free to check the stats here. I'm Israeli and I work with arabs every day, in the tech sector. They send their children to Israeli schools, and vote for parliament like any other citizen. The only major difference is that they don't have to serve in the IDF unless they want to.

Re:Oh well

[omfgnosis]

South African apartheid didn't apply to "its own citizens", it applied to a white elite ruling over a (set of) black nation(s); it implemented "sovereignty" for the black South Africans under terms like "homelands" and "bantustans". And while the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank are not Israeli citizens, they are a population Israel has ruled over since 1967, and has effectively permanent sovereignty over. The whole of Palestine has been wholly Israel for 44 years, and given Israeli politics and US support, will continue to do so indefinitely. Israel can't have both rule over the Palestinians and independence from them.

And while Israel doesn't have "Jewish beaches and Arab beaches", it has "Israeli roads and Palestinian 'roads'", and a whole set of separate laws that apply differently to Jews than to Palestinians (whether Israeli citizens or not). The most obvious case is the fact that Palestinians are not permitted to emigrate to Israel (while Jews are, by law, guaranteed that right) and are excluded from buying most land held in public trust. And while building permits are ostensibly not segregated, denials of permits are almost exclusively given to Palestinians.

This is a very small sliver of a very long list.