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AMD Says It's 'Ambidextrous,' Hints It May Offer ARM Chips
J. Dzhugashvili writes "Today at its Financial Analyst Day, AMD made statements that strongly suggest it plans to offer ARM-based chips alongside its x86 CPUs and APUs. According to coverage of the event, top executives including CEO Rory Read talked up an 'ambidextrous' approach to instruction-set architectures. One executive went even further: 'She said AMD will not be "religious" about architectures and touted AMD's "flexibility" as one of its key strategic advantages for the future.' The roadmaps the execs showed focused on x86 offerings, but it seems AMD is overtly setting the stage for a collaboration with ARM."
this means less intel in the market and more AMD!!!!
though seriously, how good is the ARM architecture today? havent tried it yet, does it provide comparable performance to an intel processor of similar price tag?
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Apparently they are bringing back the PowerPC for the new Amiga.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I don't care what they say. I'll keep buying and reccomending AMD until they screw me over like intel did. once.
Bonus. I don't have to help pay for stupid commercials.
A PC(or laptop) running Windows 8(or any OS which supports both x86 and ARM) powered by a processor having full x86-64 support, and a low power ARM with a GPU capable of basic stuff like handling browsing and media playback
So, when you switch to a high requirement program (Gaming,encoding,VS,etc) the x86 cores turn on like a coprocessor and the work is handed to them
The ARM handles the UI and other stuff
They probably should have thought of this while they had the StrongARM team in house (~2001) ... before they forced them all to quit or move to x86.
Wondering if a big state-of-the-art chip-fab like AMD getting into ARM processors might make sub-45nm ARM processors a possibility? AFAIK, only X86 chips are made like this just now. Could lead to fantastic performance-per-Watt chips coming off the line.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Does that mean it's using two ARMs at once?
(duck)
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
... would it be possible (or I guess more importantly) worthwhile to put x86 cores WITH ARM cores on a single chip?
In addition to offering dual boot capabilities, it might be useful to run "Virtual" (or sort of virtual) machines at full speed. I've often thought it would be nice to run some of the thousands(!) of cellphone Apps that I have on my laptop. Although it might be tricky to implement multi-touch correctly, still I'd think there might be some utility.
Or maybe all CPUs today are very generalized RISCy architectures with everything taken care of in microcode (or maybe nowadays it's nanocode)? That would make it (comparatively) really easy to do, right?
AMD used to make a SoC based on MIPS arch. It must not have worked out for them because they didn't really do a lot with it and finally got rid of it.
OT. Does AMD still have the same CEO and officers it did when the stock melted down a few years back? If so, the best thing AMD could do would be to fire the lot of them. There has to be competent officers at the helm for a company to succeed.
I'd love to see an AMD high end CPU using ARM instruction set , full 64 bits, etc . This could be interesting for servers.
But I'm dreaming
AMD and ARM are both design and marketing companies that don't actually make chips (external foundries do the manufacturing). ARM already has the ARM cpu design pretty well figured out, so what would AMD bring to the table in an AMD-ARM alliance? Just branding, or what?
How will I decide whether I want a right ARM or a left ARM? If they are ambidextrous, will it matter?
Since they have no products using that other architecture I think the word they were looking for is "Bicurious".
moi
This story being submitted being Stalin himself, x86 may be dying in a Gulag, and AMD and ARM may be Soviet spies. My breath freezes from the implications.
I'm shocked that the press hasn't gone wild with speculation on the name "trinity" which implies 3 of something. My guesses are as follows:
1) They integrate CPU, GPU, and "system" on a chip - not really worthy of the name
2) They integrate 3 distinct CPU architectures in APUs. Bulldozer, Bobcat, Power. Or x86, Power, ARM.
3) They are aiming for PC, Apple, and Console markets with the stuff in #2 (consoles require Power arch for backward compatibility).
My bet is that Wii U will have an IBM CPU and AMD GPU on the same die manufactured at GF. The only thing not official there is the integration.
It's also insane for Apple not to go with Trinity and there have been rumors. AMD has canceled product and delayed (public) availability of Trinity even though they claimed it was ramping and on track (last fall) for early 2012. This suggests they're stockpiling for a large customer.
That's just my speculation based on Googling of course. So they either have something big and have kept it very quiet, or the just suck.
The Tegra is basically an ARM SoC with an nVidia video system. Maybe they're looking at doing an ARM SoC with the ATI video core...
... upgrade the ARM architecture to 64 bit (hopefully, they have some experience in that), put 64 cores of it on one die, and crank the speed up to 4 GHz.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
AMD builds a hybrid chip. It uses the ARM core for everyday tasks and then the x86 core when power is necessary. Kind of what Samsung does with their 5 core processor. Add in an AMD graphics core and that would bring some power.
I will so buy a bagfull of these chips if AMD follows through on this smart thing. 28 nm multicore ARMs. Booya! Also looking forward to the integrated low power GPU.
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shirley they meant armbidextrous....
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
the problem with the x86 architecture is that it was designed to be compact and space-saving: the escape-sequences that go up and up and up from 8086 to 80186 to 286 to 386 to 486 to 586 to 64-bit are incredibly efficiently encoded. *BUT*, there comes a massive performance penalty which is that the clock rate now has to be twice as fast as a RISC processor in order to achieve the same results. RISC processors, with the exception possibly of the Xtensa (which kinda cheats by allowing VLIW as well), tend to substitute larger memory requirements for less compact instructions; ARM cheats by actually compressing the instructions! (thumb).
so it's all quite horrendously complex, but the kicker is that power goes up in a square law with processor speed. double the speed you need FOUR times the power. so, if an x86 processor has to run twice as fast to achieve the same results as a lowly RISC core which is eating twice the amount of RAM as an x86, the x86 is using FOUR times the power in order to keep up with the RISC processor.
it's never that simple, though: ARM and other RISC cores also trade higher latency for lower power. _and_ there is the issue of trying to run a 64-bit or a 128-bit memory bus, off to a separate "Northbridge" chip: these RISC all-in-one SoCs with embedded GPUs and integrated I/O just don't have that problem, and they're not trying to drive massive amounts of external lines just to get access to memory [through a silly "Northbridge" chip].
but that's not the end of the story. with the advent of DDR3 and the introduction of 28nm, RISC cores are going to eat x86 for breakfast, lunch and dinner, as RISC CPU designs means can easily run at 2 to 2.5ghz in 28nm... and still only use 1 to 1.5 watts! and with DDR3 RAM being so fast, the "problem" of latency for RISC CPUs is *also* going away.
if AMD tells you they can do a 2 watt x86 CPU (like in TFA), they aren't exactly lying, but they're sailing pretty close to the wind.
bottom line is: if they're saying that they're architecture-agnostic, that basically saves their bacon. let's hope that they do a decent job, eh? it would be absolutely cool for them to put an ATI-based "Open" GPU with full and complete GPL'd source code along-side an ARM or any other CPU core.
AMD is clearly talking about using both x86 and GPU for compute work vs. focusing on x86 only... the ARM thing is just a wild speculation, or wishful thinking.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
Was this posted be Stalin?
I think if anything, they would be commenting on their OpenCL and x86-64 arch's that are in their pipe ie x86+GPU processing, but I guess that goes over everyone's heads. Bobcat was geared towards going into phones and low-compute devices that are anything but gaming and server level applications.
Exactly. x86 might be a pain to decode, but the fact that you can replace the backend arch that actually does all the work with one that fits the particular level of complication desired means that x86 unlike ARM(or any risc for that matter) can scale from simple 8086 with 29,000 transistors to that of a westmere-ex with 2,600,000,000 transistors. and go from 8bit to 64bits, or with SIMD 256bit. when they added large caches throw in instructions for cache control/hinting. What is really needed is a fixed instruction length CISC arch with an opcode address space large enough for future expansion, a means to deprecate old instructions, keep x86 addressing(the 64bit model that is), and an ISA that is designed to be easily decoded into whatever the chip is really running.
RSC(POWER1) is the most popular CPU architecture on Mars, and possibly in the solar system outside of Earth.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Google could learn a thing from Apple's universal binaries. I currently have an android tablet running a MIPs processor. There is a severe shortage of apps available to use.
I'd go for hoping x86 will die. It's an outdated piece of junk, that even internally doesn't work anymore. Intels and AMD's simply convert that crap to RISC-ish architectures. The reason that they don't make the CPU ARM instruction compatible is because the instructions change everytime, just to get x86 apps to work faster. This has been said by John Bridgman, AMD's GPU driver manager, so the info must be correct.
It won't hurt open source and Microsoft has an internal port of Office and Windows already running on the Texas instruments and Tegra ARM platforms. This will come as Windows 8 on tablets. Killer combination, if you ask me. iPad is going to get a run for its profits.
This is pretty much in line with the AMD's Coreboot BIOS assasination strategy and the Radeon free software strategy.
Gotto love those geeks at the top of AMD :D
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I can see a future where the main computer functionality runs on ARM for basic functions such as the Operating System, User Interface, and Basic apps, and an x86 co-processor is there for compatibility with legacy apps (including running a Virtual Machine to do this if necessary) and for Intensive computing apps (eg: Gaming, Content Creation, Transcoding)
I think a lot of people mistakenly believe ARM's success is because the instruction set is just better. AMD impleminting the ARM instruction set does not, by itself, suddenly make AMD more compelling.
The ARM architecture's licensing has allowed a larger variety of companies to get in the game with their own ideas around implementation. This has led to exceeding low prices compared to the levels the x86 solutions have been willing to go, energy optimized designs to target specifically the mobile device market moreso than Intel and AMD did, and perhaps the most concrete distinction between Intel/AMD efforts to date and the successful ARM bits, system on a chip oriented designs facilitating the previous two points.
Intel seems to have begun to accept the SoC reality with Medfield, though still not willing to price down to ARM level and still not integrating as much as leading ARM implementations, they are getting closer. If AMD could push a compelling ARM archictecture solution, they could probably leverage their license for the x86 instruction set and have an implementation centered around that.
I know many people disparage the x86 instruction set but 95% of them don't even understand the arguments around it. I don't think x86 instructions drive the cost and power to the extent some people presume, it's mostly more general engineering choices.
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