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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."
It's a tough question. The Intel Atom has an edge on ARM, but it's not a big one, and while a high-performance ARM chip costs below $20, the Atom is significantly more. On the other hand, right now there are no ARM implementations that are really competitive on the PC front, and probably won't be until ARMv8 (64-bit) chips, or at least until Cortex-A15. A15 chips will probably come out in late 2012 and be a bit faster than the Atom, but a long way from Sandy Bridge and the other current Intel designs.
Its also worth noting that ARM has never been about performance until the semi-recent smart phone (mobile computing) surge. And even today, performance takes a backseat to power consumption. And it is here where ARM has always led the way. ARM vs Intel, ARM provides better price, better consumption, and very competative performance, albeit second place. But given the market to whch ARM is primarily focused on, ARM easily scores the win; in spite of Intels best efforts.
For those doing more traditional embedded development, Intel's offers are likely front runners. For those participating in the mobile computer segment, ARM, by far, is the very clear winner.
Does that mean it's using two ARMs at once?
(duck)
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
AMD lost its fabs a while ago. (Their fabs are part of GlobalFoundries now, and they're a bit ahead of TSMC, but not anywhere close to Intel in terms of process capabilities.)
The price tag is directly comparable, because ARM doesn't make processors, they sell licenses to designs. The only relevant metric is really performance at a given power point.
The closest competitor is Intel's Atom chips. At comparable power points, the current ARM chips seem to substantially outperform Atom chips, and the ARM chips scale far lower than Intel's do. It becomes a bit murkier at higher power levels, since until recently nobody was really making ARM chips that high, but we'll see a lot more competition in this field in the future with the ARM Cortex A15, which is intended to be a lot more scalable. The current design is planned to go from 1.0GHz single-core, up to 2.5GHz eight-core, depending on what the integrator wants. On top of that, they've got the new Cortex A7 that they've designed as an ultra-lower performance chip, which is intended to be a much simpler architecture that's still ISA-compatible with the A15. The intention is actually to put an A7 and A15 in the same SoC, so that the SoC can entirely turn off the A15 cores when only low performance is needed (like playing audio or video, since that's done almost entirely on a DSP). This is similar to what nVidia did with the Tegra 3, just taken even farther.
AIUI ARM do HDL design of processor cores, then they pass that HDL on to other companies who make complete chip designs based on it. Those companies in turn pass the designs onto fabs (which may be in-house or external) for manufacture. IIRC some vendors also do their own HDL work and only license the basic architectural design from ARM.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
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.
"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.