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AMD Licenses 64-bit Processor Design From ARM
angry tapir writes "AMD has announced it will sell ARM-based server processors in 2014, ending its exclusive commitment to the x86 architecture and adding a new dimension to its decades-old battle with Intel. AMD will license a 64-bit processor design from ARM and combine it with the Freedom Fabric interconnect technology it acquired when it bought SeaMicro earlier this year."
The panel discussion that accompanied the AMD news conference was absolutely painful to watch. The only thing I learned is how completely clueless the CxOs of the 'cloud computing era' really are. Seeing company officers from Dell, RedHat and Facebook drool allover themselves like that was yet another painful lesson that the fratboys of the world have turned the tech industry into their drunken biatch.
I'm hoping AMD does something to stay relevant. If they were to leave the market (or effectively leave the market by selling super low volume), then there's nothing to keep Intel honest.
Hello,
When it comes to servers, I use comparatively few (a small lab with a few rack's worth that used for research projects) at work, so I'm wondering what sort of tasks these would be useful for? It sounds like they'll run RHEL and other Linux distributions, but even after looking at the second slide in this presentation, it's unclear to me advantage this would be to a a small business, or, in my case, a small department in a larger organization.
Is this new CPU/server line intended only for the enterprise? If so, what would the "trickle down effect" be for small groups like my own? Also, why would someone want to throw out their investment in existing hardware (including whatever talent they might have at programming and maintaining said hardware) for a design that's relatively proprietary?
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
x86-64 and 64-bit ARM on the same chip?
I can see this being a remarkable selling point for Windows devices if both ARM and x86 code can execute on the same device without emulation.
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x86/AMD64 is overkill for many server functions.
It will be interesting to see if chips appear optimized for different functions.
For example hardware sql accelerators or massive i/o for file serving.
Since many hardware raid controllers are nothing but ARM cores anyway it would be interesting to see multiple cores, some used as RAID controllers and some more advanced cores for the os and file serving with a 10GB lan controller all on one chip.
Add power, drives and Ram and have a killer file server.
If AMD can push their engineering into ARM quickly, they might not only stand a chance but they might dominate fairly quickly, I'd think. They're not on par with Intel on die size, but IIRC they're pretty close - that knowledge is certainly applicable.
Remember, they've got good GPUs already. A lot of what they tried to do with the Mobility and later generations were very "ARM-like" already, it just didn't exactly work due to x86 limitations. I'd think they've got a pretty good chance overall. (If anything, it's a big market. Tegra# are really pushing NVidia along, after all...)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I'm sure this is just AMD hedging their bets against multiple processor ISAs. There are places where ARM is better than x86/x86-64, so it makes sense to try and dominate those niches. It falls in line perfectly with AMD being a less expensive alternative to Intel.
Given that Intel is trying to wind down its StrongARM line it inherited from DEC, AMD may see the ARM line as a place where it can finally be top dog. It has the expertise to give Broadcom, TI and Samsung a run for their money.
Taking a really big drink from the hypothetical Kool-Aid, I could see ARM64 processors being used as x86-64 replacements in palmtops and laptops. There are a couple of x86 to ARM translators on the market, which would solve the binary compatibility issue. I used FX!32 back during the NT4 and NT5beta days with my DEC workstation, and it made emulated binaries about 90% as fast as native. With advances in JITC translators and a cleanup of the x86-64 ISA to make it closer to meeting Popek and Goldberg virtualization requirements, I could see a good modern translator being 95+% as fast as native x86-64 code.
I've been expecting Apple to churn out a Power Book with an ARM processor and a binary translator. They did it with m68K -> PPC and PPC -> x86, so I wouldn't be surprised in the least to see x86 -> ARM. Now imagine it with an AMD ARM64 SoC at the heart of it.
An over-priced slow server, ARM will grow to dominate the market. The same way Intel's slow and over priced servers have become commonplace.
Well we'd try something else, but it turns out monkeys with notepads and crayons are even slower (and more expensive).
Biodegradable, though.
I wouldn't be surprised at all if Intel had a team working on ARM ISA designs as a contingency plan, but I highly doubt they'd transition to ARM unless x86 was facing virtual annihilation. They're well aware that if they start releasing ARM chips, the whole industry will much more quickly transition away from x86. There's no way they would willingly destroy their extremely profitable, high-margin x86 business.
Intel will be doing the same thing in 3... 2... 1... Just like missing the 64-bit era with Itanium, it is missing he mobile era with Atom.
What are you even talking about? Since when did Intel miss the "64 bit era" as you put it? Sure, Itanium was a failure and Intel sunk billions of dollars trying to make it work. However, Intel could afford that mistake and still continue chugging along. As things stand today, Intel absolutely dominates the 64 bit market. In fact, except for Intel, AMD, and the IBM Power chips, there is no other game in town as far as 64 bit is concerned, and in this market, Intel probably has 80% or 90% market share, and has the best performance and performance per watt numbers.
So, I'm not sure which 64 bit era you are talking about, and how Intel missed it.
As far as Atom is concerned, yes, Intel is struggling quite a bit. However, Intel is trying to scale down its power consumption while ARM is trying to scale up its performance. Sooner or later, the two shall meet and it will be a very interesting battle. I wouldn't write off Intel so soon yet. In fact, the upcoming Clovertrail based Windows 8 tablets should be a very interesting launch. Take a look at the Thinkpad Tablet 2 for example. It should be a very interesting tablet for corporate customers or for users who want x86 along with Windows 8 Pro along with 3G and LTE mobility and a full-size USB port and with 8-9 hrs battery life.
I'm not saying Intel will win or lose, and it needs be relentless in improving power efficiency to even be a viable alternative to ARM. However, to say that Atom has already lost the race is a bit premature.
Your facts are off two ways. First, going up against one big monopolistic company is a lot harder than going up against a lot of small ones. (Do you think it's easier to fight an elephant or a bunch of guys who are also fighting each other,) Second, they've managed to survive in the x86 market for 30 years. I think that counts as competing.
An ARM processor doing binary translation for x86 would be like trying to tow an 18-wheeler with a Tata Nano. ARM may be low-power, but it's also...well, low-power. Even older Core 2 chips wipe the floor with ARM's latest and greatest from a performance standpoint.
AMD no longer has a fab of their own, as of two years ago(?). I believe they are currently using TSMC for most of their production.
Note the article says ARM *server* processors. In that market, GPUs are totally irrelevant, power usage is secondary to performance, and price of the CPU is a distant third.
Any ARM CPU is at least an order of magnitude behind the current x86-64 server CPUs. Not to mention the additional work required to support multiple ARM CPUs on a motherboard, and even convince the major server manufacturers to build an ARM-based server in the first place. Good luck AMD, though you won't need it since even luck won't help you here...
Who want's to make bets on who is going to win this race? AMD has won all of the previous ones.
I assume you are joking, right? It's not a sprint, it's a marathon. Being first to market means nothing, it's winning the market. And Intel is crushing the 64-bit processor market right now.
Maybe the new direction is going to be heterogeneous computing. We're already seeing AMD and Intel combine x86 and a GPU on one die; maybe AMD will try to combine everything and have a couple of ARM cores for low-power tasks, a couple of Bulldozer modules for more intensive tasks, all combined with their GPU.
In fact AMD has an amazing technology portfolio. Having graphics chip (ATI Division), the hypertransport technology and AMD64, we can expect some interesting developments
Intel went for IA-64 and it was a complete failure. Ultimately, it was forced to adopt the AMD-64 instruction set. That's what I mean -- Intel missed the boat and the 64-bit instruction set it uses isn't even its own. Since adopting AMD-64, it's dominated the market space. If it wants to get anywhere in the mobile space, it will need to fold its current Atom strategy and go all-out ARM. Until it does that, it's Itanium all over again.
ARM architectures are considered more energy-efficient for some workloads because they were originally designed for mobile phones and consume less power.
Fuck no. The ARM1 was released in 1987 as a coprocessor for Acorn's BBC Micro. They were designed for low power operation because the engineers were impressed with the 6502's efficiency. There weren't any significant mobile phone deployments until 18 years later in 2005.
Note the article says ARM *server* processors. In that market, GPUs are totally irrelevant, power usage is secondary to performance, and price of the CPU is a distant third.
That is as has been, but I'm wondering if this is not a strategic move on their part. Perhaps They are thinking of large clusters of low power ARM cores that kick in as the workload demands with some kind of clever way of sharing resources (Freedom Fabric?). With the global political landscape the way it is, that could be an important point of difference.
Reducing energy consumption is now the "in thing" and will continue to grow in purchasing decisions as financial incentives to reduce carbon emissions grow. If a server can be run using a single voltage PSU instead of needing different voltage on different rails, there are likely to be energy savings over x86. If that server can idle at less than a Watt and then ramp up in small increments as demand requires, that might also yield an overall advantage.
Sure, for serious continuous load applications, it's probably not the best, but for a lot of cloud type applications I can see this as being useful for renewable energy supplied server farms.
I'm just speculating of course, and I fully agree GPUs are irrelevant, but I think the idea that power usage is always secondary to performance has reached it's use by date.
I don't therefore I'm not.
Second, they've managed to survive in the x86 market for 30 years. I think that counts as competing.
The OP has a point.
AMD has abandoned the high end CPU market to Intel.
AMD's brand new, 8-core, flagship CPU, is competing with Intel's 4-core i5 chip.
And despite being clocked higher, it loses to the i5 in almost(?) every single-core test.
I know AMD pioneered the multi-core field, but they've gotten left behind.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
That is as has been, but I'm wondering if this is not a strategic move on their part. Perhaps They are thinking of large clusters of low power ARM cores that kick in as the workload demands with some kind of clever way of sharing resources (Freedom Fabric?). ...
If that server can idle at less than a Watt and then ramp up in small increments as demand requires, that might also yield an overall advantage.
After 20 years of Wintel I finally caved to try a Mac. The new MBP Retina is insanely fast CPU-wise for the same battery use over my old laptop (not quite as much GPU-wise vs my Windows desktop, but we are not talking GPUs). And when I'm not doing much it uses very little power. That's with a 4-core (hyperthreaded to 8) i7.
Intel has already come up with solutions for standby & lower power scenarios - when doing nothing there isn't much difference. When doing "a little bit" ARM definitely wins, and when loaded the ARM isn't even in the equation since it can't come close to the loads of the high end x86-64 CPUs. And it also depends on the application, as you say. For large data-intensive applications the power draw of the motherboard, RAM, HDDs, etc. surpass the CPU anyway so it's diminishing returns.
Anyway, I do think there is a market for low power servers. But it's currently a really low margin, barely profitable market, and will be until power costs are higher than hardware costs for the advantages it brings. And does anyone really think Intel is not capable of adapting to the market at that point to maximize their profits yet again?
Indeed. I am trying to grasp, somewhat desperately, the events that must have taken place inside AMD headquarters when the CPU design team said they wanted to do hyper-threading. Having seen how badly Intel got knocked around when they did it, and the fact that for the price of duplicating a fair amount of the CPU, you are still only occasionally eking out a slight performance gain...and sometimes, a performance loss, their strategy doesn't make sense. What was so hard about welding two Phenom II X6's together, using the hyperlinks already present in the CPU design, and calling it a day? Knowing full well that Intel wouldn't be able to compete with that design (they've been core adverse compared to AMD), being happy that all of the cores were full cores (who'd complain?), and that they'd be a hot item for system builders everywhere. Sure, some of the gaming websites like to barf about how single-threaded performance still matters, on some games that no one cares about (the GPU, of course, mattering a lot more than the single-threaded performance of a CPU here), but to take the advantage of having 6 full cores, and trade it in for 8 half-cores...was this some idiotic attempt at market segmentation? Did some moron in a suit have a brain fart, and think "we can't have 12-core Phenom IIIs, it will cannibalize our Opteron server sales"? Fire his ass, and cut the strings on his golden parachute on the way out.
For the life me, I just can't fathom how they turned a major market advantage, with the CPU design practically on the design table already, with a popular and critically acclaimed design, and decided that f*ck it, we're doing so well here, let's go for a lobotomy, and compete on Intel's turd with an unproven half-assed design. Let's go from a full-core design that everyone complements, to some terrible half-core design that nearly killed Intel at some point. Seriously, who is commanding AMD such that they were in their nappies when the whole Intel hyper-threading business was going down (which every half-decent tech knows about), and how did they get boardroom approval?
The proper response, of course, was not the Business School of Failure's attempt at mandating some perverse product differentiation, which bears as much similarity to surgery as bludgeoning a person to death with a hammer, but through true, non-crippling differentiation. Phenom IIIs get 12-cores, and the latest SSE instructions + something that the boys down in the instruction lab cook up; Opterons get larger caches + more cores + special server instruction sets that mean something concrete, even if it means implementing hardware Apache threads; that's on top of the SSE3 stuff and so forth. Would companies buy Opterons over Phenoms if one had hardware accelerated support for web services over the other? I believe the survey would say hell yes.
As for the GPU stuff, the low-cost, low-power stuff is nice for chump change, but it's a fierce market with many competitors. What you want, what large companies no doubt want, is the ability to slam in GPU-daughter boards, to add 10 or 20 7970 GPUs on a single board (preferably with sockets, which drives up the cost a few cents, but also taps into the smaller markets, where you may buy 4 GPUs now, and 6 later), so that they can drive those large super-computing projects that already make use of these GPUs, but do so more efficiently.
As for gaming, the more stream processors, I imagine, the better. When in doubt, double them, as it will give Intel and Nvidia something to curse over.
I am John Hurt.
While you may have wandered in from the territory where the beige box is called the "hard drive" and the screen on the desk is called "the computer", there's people that work with the hardware, and some of that hardware is Xeons, 16 core AMD cpus, sparcs etc etc. Even though I'm only at the cheap end of that stuff I don't mistake the desktop for the "high end".
Your argument doesn't stack up.
First you say they're bringing an 8 core chip to compete with a 4 core chip. Fine. Then you complain the cores cannot keep up 1:1. So you're expecting AMD's chips to be twice as good as intel's to be able to compete.
That, of course, is rigging the test, and so is dishonest.
One could also say that with single cores not much worse than the competition, but double the number of cores, and a lower price to boot, you get better value. Moreso if you can make good use of the double number of cores.
And that's before considering that single-core benchmarks are entirely unrepresentative for multi-core performance thanks to various tricks like turbo core and turbo boost — that aren't 1:1 comparable so you'd have to do full, sustained benchmarks on all cores simultaneously to find out which delivers the most sustained instructions per second.
Meaning that AMD's offering takes more marketing footwork, but technically is not all bad. Not at all.
I would think that taking pre-compiled X86-binaries and then translating {pre-compiled and optimized for x86} code into ARM code is a waste of time and a lot of premature optimization.
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And considering what they'd been doing with Pink / Taligent in keeping a parallel universe of development of their codebase always going on the x86 architecture while publicly showing only PowerPC development, they've probably got a skunks-work factory team somewhere that's already been running ARM-based IOS or even ARM-based OSX for a year if not for years...
The Thubans were good, but everything based on Bulldozer just blows through power while having terrible IPC, thanks to having shared integer and floating point units. If they were to be honest the "modules" would be treated as single cores with hardware assisted hyperthreading, because the benches show that is a hell of a lot closer to what they are than to true cores.
Errrm, all of the integer units are dedicated and the shared floating point units still give each core as much floating-point resources as on the previous generation of AMD chips even if every single core is using floating point 100% of the time. If AMD hadn't screwed up on the engineering side, it'd be a really great design.
I don't have mod points but I am equally as puzzled. AMD haven't had that many opportunities over the past few years (none at all really) but that was certainly one.
Sadly the systems I work on are all Intel because we do a great deal of report and post-processing on data and that requires CPU grunt and running as much as we can in parallel. Had AMD done this they would have been under consideration. Hyper-threading makes very little if any difference to us really, it's all about getting as many full cores on as possible.
For me it would make more sense if they followed the MIPS64 path. But.. its their money.
But it's not a lot of small ones - it's companies like TI, Broadcom, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Freescale, Samsung, Hitachi, and so on. Each much larger than AMD.
Also, there is nothing about ARM that inherently makes it more powersaving @ the same performance level than other RISC CPUs, be it SPARC, POWER, MIPS and so on.
It's been said before on this thread, but I'll say it again. AMD remaining solvent while competing against Intel for 30 years is a lot more impressive than most people realize, especially considering they competed using Intel's own ISA. It's too soon to tell now, but it's reasonable to expect that AMD (being in Intel's weight class) could plausibly compete with most of the current ARM manufacturers. I'd certainly expect their 64 bit server chip efforts to be a lot more interesting than what the cell phone chip makers have been putting out from a performance perspective.
This is almost certainly for a SeaMicro-based architecture. The GPU might be mildly irrelevant in this market today but will continue to gain importance as more tasks transition to being executable via OpenCL & its cousins.
What you are looking at is a small box densely packed with lots of cores. Another flavor will likely come as a box with a few weak ARM CPUs used to control a large quantity of GPUs for HPC applications.
The thing that will make or break ARM in a SeaMicro style chassis is whether they can get a successful OpenStack port to it done in time for the launch. My guess is that they will, as OpenStack development is going gangbusters at the moment.
It's a relatively small club. Note that both the headline and summary are wrong. AMD has not licensed a processor design, they have licensed the right to make their own implementation of the ARMv8 architecture (which isn't just a piece of paper, it includes access to ARM's rich set of regression tests and assistance from ARM engineers when requested on both the hardware design and the supporting software). I know of three other companies working on ARMv8 designs. For ARMv7, I think there is basically only ARM with the Cortex series and Qualcomm with the Snapdragon (which is a massively hacked-up Cortex A8, with a completely redesigned FPU, a better interconnect, and some other improvements, but not a complete independent implementation). Compare this with the ARMv4 and ARMv5 situation, where StrongARM and XScale were complete independent implementations. ARM has intentionally delayed producing their own ARMv8 design to give other companies a chance and promote more competition. This worked very well for x86 during the '90s, when Intel, AMD, Cyrix/IBM, IDT, and others were all pushing out compatible products at different market segments. In the ARM world, because they all have to go through the same set of conformance tests, compatibility should be even higher.
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I am trying to grasp, somewhat desperately, the events that must have taken place inside AMD headquarters when the CPU design team said they wanted to do hyper-threading. Having seen how badly Intel got knocked around when they did it, and the fact that for the price of duplicating a fair amount of the CPU, you are still only occasionally eking out a slight performance gain...and sometimes, a performance loss, their strategy doesn't make sense
Perhaps they looked at IBM or Sun's implementation of SMT instead. Adding a second context to the POWER series added about 10% to the die area and gave around a 50% speedup. If you have multithreaded workloads (especially on a server) then it can significantly improve throughput for two very simple reasons. The first is that when one context has a cache miss, the CPU doesn't sit idle, it can let the other core work. The second is that it makes branch misprediction penalties lower, because if you're issuing instructions alternately from two contexts you can get the instruction that the branch depends on a lot closer to the end of the pipeline than before you need to make the prediction. This also helps with various other hazards, so you don't need so much logic for out-of-order execution to get the same throughput.
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Also, there is nothing about ARM that inherently makes it more powersaving @ the same performance level than other RISC CPUs, be it SPARC, POWER, MIPS and so on.
I can think of several things. For Thumb-2, there is instruction density. MIPS16 does about as well as Thumb-1, but it is massive pain to work with. AArch64 doesn't (yet) have a Thumb-3 encoding, but one will almost certainly appear after ARM has done a lot of profiling of the kinds of instruction that CPUs like to generate. Even in ARM mode, the big win over the other RISC architectures is the it has fairly complex addressing modes, so you can do things like structure and array offset calculations in one instruction on ARM or 3-4 on MIPS. For AArch32, you also have predicated instructions. These make a big difference on a very low power chip, because you don't need to have any branches for small conditionals. For AArch64, most of these are gone, but there is still a predicated move, which is a very powerful version of a select instruction and lets you do mostly the same things. With AArch32 you have store and load multiple instructions, which basically let you do all of your register spills and reloads in a single instruction (the instruction takes a mask of the registers to save, the register to use as the base, and whether to post- or pre- increment or decrement it as two flags). With AArch64, they replaced this with a store-pair instruction, which can store two registers, and has the advantage of being simpler to implement (fixed number of cycles to execute).
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Note the article says ARM *server* processors. In that market, GPUs are totally irrelevant, power usage is secondary to performance
Begging the question. Is power usage actually secondary? Not for many kinds of workloads, which are storage-intensive. For SOME servers it doesn't make sense. For OTHER servers, it clearly makes sense; people are already using ARM-based servers. Perhaps you should consider a little self-education.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When you're on the client side of the network, it makes no difference what's on the server side. It could be a giant room full of hamsters and abacus. As long as the results come back fast and correct, you shouldn't care. That's the way the internet was designed. Heck, that's why it'd called the Inter-Net. Inter networking between different processor platforms.
Intel is a one trick pony. Besides the evolution of the x86, they have never fielding an architecture that had any staying power. Anyone remember the i432 or the i860? The current standard x86-64 architecture was defined by AMD, not Intel. Itanium got that moniker because it was accurate. The only reason that the Itanium is alive is because of a civil suit by HP.
What Intel is really really good at is putting gates on silicon. They did not succeed on architectural grounds, but by having the best implementation of a clunky architecture. They were always able to succeed by using more gates at a lower price then the competition.
ARM is an architectural rival to x86. Intel won with the x86 because they could cram more gates onto silicon. They loose this advantage against ARM because ARM requires less silicon to do the same job. This translates to lower power usage, which is getting more and more important as time goes on. Other foundries can compete even if they are trailing Intel in processes capabilities, and they want to be in this market. As does AMD.
ARM also benefits from being the dominant architecture for the smart phone/tablet sector, which means that there is a large community of developers and all the software one could ever want. An ARM-centric ecology exists, and it applies to servers as well as client software. Linux/GCC/MySql are happy on ARM, so any open source server software is easily available. And Microsoft has shown they are ready to run on ARM as well. It's not a risk from a software point of view.
It's not that Intel/AMD x86 is going away, but ARM will also be a player. And we should all be glad about it, because AMD being less competitive with Intel is the road to monopoly, which means increased prices and a stagnant CPU sector.
Why is Snark Required?
Get your facts right please, there was a bunch of x86 manufacturers, so argument "only one competitor" doesn't stand, they were there and they all died, unlike AMD:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_x86_manufacturers
Now, regarding Intel, the company that has bleeding edge fabs, as simply "one competitor" is a demagogy.
x86 is also so much more complex than ARM. AMD in ARM world would be like heavy weight boxer competing with a bunch of 60kg guys.
I guess you take the words of Intel fanboys literally. No, the Bulldozer architecture is not hyper-threading. No, it does not mean only a slight performance gain and especially not a performance loss. I recently made 3 microbenchmarks on an Opteron 6234 (Bulldozer too). I measured the negative effect of sharing some circuits in a Bulldozer core. This negative effect varies from insignificant to small (3%, 13%, 25%). I run the same two threads on the two cores of a single bulldozer unit vs two cores on separate units. Intel hyper-threading brings 30% more performance - in the best case. The bulldozer core pair brings 75% more performance - in the worst case. How can you compare them? They are not in the same league.
The funniest benchmark was the floating point. The most frequent complaint against the Bulldozer architecture is that two cores share a single floating point unit. AMD should tell one million times that yes, they share a single floating point unit, but that is a 256 bit wide unit, which can be split into two 128 bit parts. And what is the size of the usual floating point number? Not 256 bit, not 128 bit, but only 64. In reality I measured that the two cores in a single unit processes floating point instructions almost at full speed. The negative effect of circuit sharing was only 3%, barely measurable. How ironic.
All that is right, throughput increases, but you'll still reduce the single thread performance.
I'm aware that AMD replicated a fuller set of the core on their hyperthreading architecture than Intel did. But even then, hyperthreading always means highter throughput but lower thread performance.
And if they really did get 50% more throughput by using 10% more area, they lost the perfect opportunity to come out with a 8 cores 16 threads model. Why did they kept it at 6 cores?
Rethinking email
In theory, yes (I'll take your word for it). But in practice, something went wrong. In actual benchmarks, the four-module/8-core FX8150 could barely beat the fastest Phenom II X6 "Thuban" 1100T, despite being made in 32nm instead of 40nm like the Phenom II.
Using your metric of "75% more performance - in the worst case", the FX8150 should have performed like a 7-core Thuban, not counting any advantages from the improved manufacturing process. As it is, it did perform much like a 7-core Thuban. Except that in some benchmarks the Thuban actually won.
A Thuban 6-core in in 32nm would probably perform on the level of the FX8150. A Thuban 8-core in in 32nm might even beat the "Piledriver" FX8350.
So one really has to wonder what happened at AMD. Maybe the anonymous AMD ex-employee told the truth about a premature switch to automated design. (see http://www.insideris.com/amd-spreads-propaganda-ex-employee-speaks-out/)
C - the footgun of programming languages
200-250 Watts is perfectly fine in my world. I have an 850 Watt power supply in my main machine, I think it can supply the needed energy.
There has never been a chip to consume that much power because it would catch fire. It isn't speculation. The highest wattage CPU made was 140W. There is a really good reason for that. You can carry away all of the heat unless the cores are laid side by side, but then you would have a processor the size of your motherboard.
The GPU on die stuff is cute, but honestly, who cares?
Imagine a world, where your video card has a direct link to your CPU (and memory). It is here! It is more than cute, it is efficient and effective. The short of it, however, is they aren't putting super-magically-delicious GPU cores in them... yet.
You also are totally missing the purpose of having an/many ARM cores in with the x86 cpu. It's ultra-low power stupid cores that you can throw a multitude of tasks at, without throwing away x86 compatibility. The Amiga is a great example of how this would work.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson