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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."
Not technically true. Power7 belongs to the same family of architectures as PowerPC, but it's not really appropriate to say that Power7 is a PowerPC implementation. You might say that PowerPC is an uncle of Power7.
The problem with ARM is there are literally millions of x86 programs that have become an integral part of peoples lives, this is also why even though Linux has been getting better each year it fails to find any real gains. Everything from that camera that came with the photo software your Aunt Sue loves to Corel and Photoshop, from that bain of Linux geeks MS Office to Quickbooks/Quicken which is God in small business and rightly so.
The reason ARM is able to gain so much in mobile is because frankly geeks have never understood how normal users think, as someone who has to understand their needs or go out of business i think i can shed some light. you see to a geek that Droid or iPhone is a general computing device, to a normal user it doesn't even have an OS, its just "A screen with buttons i can google and play games on that I'll chunk when the contract is up" and that's it. they have been conditioned that nothing is compatible so assume when they chunk the phone the only thing they'll keep is the SIM card and that's that. Creates a lot of waste but is great for the carrier. Tablets to the consumer is the same, its a large mostly disposable flatscreen TV that can let them Google. There is no real attachment there, no real desire by the majority to develop long term rapport with programs. this is why ARM netbooks went nowhere because to them a netbook is NOT just a general computing device, its a "baby laptop that should do everything my big laptop does only slower, because babies are smaller than grownups" see how that works?
I think where AMD is on the right track and has a real shot is Fusion. Not 3 years ago i could walk into the local Walmart or staples and i'd be lucky if there was a single AMD machine, usually the cheapest machine in the house. Now I see AMD Fusion netbooks, laptops, all in ones, and even desktops, some going up to nearly $1000 in price and talking to some of the guys that i know working there they are brisk sellers. More and more the PC is not only the office machine, its also an entertainment center With the AMD Fusion chips not only do you get great battery life/lower electric bills, like my EEE E350 that gets 6 hours playing 720p and lets me HDMI into any 1080p set and watch videos, but you also get to have all your programs that you know and are familiar with and which frankly there is often no FOSS equivalent and probably never will be. There is no FOSS software that matches the features of Quickbooks or photoshop, and certainly nothing like the little quilting app I installed the other day for a customer on her new Acer AMD C60 netbook. while FOSS users would probably think its stupid and not waste time for her its a "must have" because it helps her to work up the patterns she is gonna use on her next quilt and to visualize what it will look like.
So I think the future is bright IF, and that's a BIG IF, AMD continues to play it smart. the new Vector based GPUs will lower the power footprint even lower while letting the APU use the GPU cores like a super fast floating point which will give any program using floating point a nice kick in the ass, and considering they've had to lower desktop output to keep up with all the orders for the Bobcat chips shows the OEMs think its the right path too. you can now get those chips in every form factor you can name, from HTPC to iMac style to netbooks and laptops. While i'm sure AMD never considered it a desktop chip the OEMs found that its more than good enough for the average user and its selling quite briskly so they made a good call there.
Finally there is one place where AMD has already fucked up, and that's the recent killing of the entire AM3 line. While consolidating to a few chips would have been smart IMHO killing the AM3 Stars chips when Bulldozer has neither the yields nor performance to take its place was just stupid. if you have an AM3 board I'd suggest you pop over to tigerdirect where they are selling Thu
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
*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.
That's just complete bollocks.
A modern x86 processor (meaning... since the Pentium Pro in the mid 90s) is, internally, a RISC-like core with full OoO execution and so on and so forth.
Variable instruction decode is a pain in the ass and does add latency in the front end. This isn't great, but it is nowhere near a 50% reduction in IPC. Try more like 1-2% (measured via correlated cycle-accurate performance simulator), depending on how clever you get and in any case easily made up for by a clever widget or two.
Basically predictions of RISC eating x86 for breakfast were made over 15 years ago and never came to pass. Mostly by x86 morphing so that the difference was essentially irrelevant.
Your talk about northbridges sounds woefully out of date, too. This has nothing to do with ISA, and both major x86 vendors now have integrated northbridges.
You're closer to reality when talking about power. Regardless of the small IPC penalty, those decoders burn up a lot of power. There are ways to get around this, too, and for moderate perf moderate low power x86 does just fine. At the very low end of power, though, going to something like ARM makes sense.
The enemies of Democracy are
"The problem with ARM is there are literally millions of x86 programs that have become an integral part of peoples lives"
Not really. There are many ARM programs that have become and integral part of people lives. Android and IOS are two big example not to mention the apps that run on them.
Software is not as locked to an ISA as it once was. Microsoft and Apple have shown that with the move of Windows to ARM and the move of OS/X to x86.
Applications are not written in assembly anymore they are written in C++ or another high level language. Take your example of Photoshop? Moving Photoshop from Windows to Windows on ARM is probably a much simpler project a Windows and OS/X version. The same is true of Office.
I do think that AMDs Fusion is interesting but your reasoning on why people will keep use the x86 is not valid. They will only keep using x86 for as long as that is the best solution. IMHO x86 is endanger of being the next PDP-11 or VAX unless it can scale down to mobile and fast.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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