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AMD and ARM Team Up
Vigile writes "Today AMD is making an announcement that is the first step in a drastic transition for the company by integrating an ARM Cortex A5 processor on the same die with upcoming Fusion APUs. Starting in late 2013, all AMD APUs (processors that are combinations of x86 cores and Radeon SIMD arrays) will also integrate an ARM Cortex A5 processor to handle security for online transactions, banking, identity protection and DRM integration. The A5 is the smallest Cortex processor available, and that would make sense to use it in a full APU so it will not take up more than 10-15 square mm of die space. This marks the first time AMD has licensed ARM technology and while many people were speculating a pure ARM+Radeon hybrid, this move today is being described as the 'first step' for AMD down a new road of dexterity as an IP-focused technology company with their GPU technology as 'the crown jewel.' So while today's announcement might focus on using ARM processors for security purposes, the future likely holds much more these two partners."
So AMD and ARM team up, and the product of their blissful union is an on-die TPM?
Thanks for nothing, guys.
So, they have these universal processing units, and the ARM part of them is doing fuckall but DRM? I can't exactly say "yay".
Why not rename the whole business to AAA, for ARM, AMD, ATI?
This would also make them the first chip maker in the phone book.
Before you start flaming about DRM and TPM taking over your computer and all, please remember that all TPM chips currently available allow you to install your own keys. This hardware root of trust allows you to verify that your Linux installation has not been tampered with. It also is a good place to store hard disk encryption keys, because the TPM chip makes it extremely difficult to do brute force attacks on your password. I simply can not imagine why anybody would intentionally buy a modern computer without these wonderful capabilities.
Seriously, you go through all that trouble to cram an ARM core in there, and you use it for exactly what it's *worst* at?
Crypto is best done by specialized, single-purpose hardware. Intel has special units on their chips just for certain common crypto algorithms. Doing it in software, on a core that's underpowered compared to the x86 cores next to it is retarded.
The strengths of ARM is low power. Doing what the Wii did would be a wonderful idea - they had a small ARM core on the northbridge, used to do online updates and such while in sleep mode. Imagine if your computer could keep your emails and RSS feeds synched and run updates while in sleep mode. Yes, it would need some OS-level support, and could probably be done better with an ultra-weak x86 core just for better compatibility (just take an old K6 core, shrink it down to 32nm and trim the cache - you don't need power, you just need small). Maybe it wouldn't be a killer feature, it would probably go unused by most users, but it's something that would actually *work*.
Sounds like a console chip to me.
The A5 is the smallest Cortex processor available
Really? I figured that the Cortex-M0 would be smaller. The M0 doesn't even have a cache. Indeed, ARM's Cortex-M0 product page agrees, saying:
The ARM Cortex(tm)-M0 processor is the smallest ARM processor available.
so it's not clear why the article is calling the A5 the smallest?
I think it's a bad idea for many reasons. The main one being that the swiss army knife approach means mediocre subcomponents.
While a SoC solution may be good for embedded devices, it just doesn't seem a good idea for a desktop device; it's like replacing a discrete component stereo system with a receiver - it's bigger, lower quality, and you can't upgrade the one component that's not up to par - you have to toss the whole thing. Yay for consumerism.
Yes, having components on the chip can have advantages, when the bottleneck is the access latency and electrical path length. This is not the case here - the A5 is way too slow for it to be significant whether you have it in the CPU or in a box across the room.
I'd much rather be able to buy the TPM modules and coprocessors that I want, and even keep them if I upgrade the CPU.
please remember that all TPM chips currently available allow you to install your own keys.
Which won't help if both the cable company and the DSL company start using Trusted Network Connect to control home customers' access to their networks. In such a case, you wouldn't be able to get Internet service with your own key on the TPM.
ARM's processors aren't powerful enough to run Win8 Boxes.
And lets be honest here, when Android, IPhone, and all the other big OS players in the mobile market were developing their OS's they were developing them to small Motorola, Arm, Apple and Intel embedded non-x86 processors. So that means VERY limited app functionality from their standpoint and to get cross platform compatability you need java and browser support because NOBODY is going to spend a fortune developing an app just for one vendor's OS.
What does the A5 have that AMD needs? it has Cell signalling functionality, a Mature TPM platform, a mature hardware security platform, and VPN acceleration.
AMD doesn't have the Mature TPM platform on it's x86 lineup which if you want to stop people from, say, jailbreaking your new Win8 tablet that was sold under contract, is a big thing; Intel Does but AMD isn't going to license it from their competition. Also Microsoft is going to write a new hardware standard for Win8 just like they did for Vista/7, which means new DRM requirements which means new hardware lockout requirements. Want your tablet to provide a "rich media experience"? Well, in order for your Tablet to wirelessly interface with your TV and enable playback of video from the tablet to the TV, you just GOT to have the newest DRM standard (think HDCP for Wifi).
They're also missing instructions on their cores for accelerating cell signalling functions which you need if you want to boosting signal resolution, which in turn, enables you to use less power for your cell connection. Finally, if your mobile device is always-VPN'd into your corporate network, and you want to run VOIP chat over it, you get 150MS end to end for your latency, and VPN encryption adds anywhere from 10-50ms of signal processing on EACH END of the connection. This is the reason you see 3des modules for Cisco security appliances; you can offload the processing onto a seperate board thus decreasing the latency substantially.
So what AMD does is they aim to take their current GPU/CPU offering, which will do decent graphics on a 10" tablet running at, say, 1024x768 or similar resolution, then toss the A5 ontop to handle the cellphone end of the system, then wait for the die size to shrink to give them that extra 25% of die space, retool their chips to be ultra-ultra low power, toss all that goobly gop into a single chip, license the driver binaries from ARM, retool them for windows, and offer it to the market as a complete, embedded solution.
That is going to be VERY attractive to companies like HTC.
Lets face it, if we cut out the northbridge entirely from the equation and stick 1-2 southbridges all with embedded devices on them, really things get very tiny.