AMD Announces First ARM Processor

MojoKid writes "AMD's Andrew Feldman announced today that the company is preparing to sample its new eight-core ARM SoC (codename: Seattle). Feldman gave a keynote presentation at the fifth annual Open Compute Summit. The Open Compute Project (OCP) is Facebook's effort to decentralize and unpack the datacenter, breaking the replication of resources and low volume, high-margin parts that have traditionally been Intel's bread-and-butter. AMD is claiming that the eight ARM cores offer 2-4x the compute performance of the Opteron X1250 — which isn't terribly surprising, considering that the X1250 is a four-core chip based on the Jaguar CPU, with a relatively low clock speed of 1.1 — 1.9GHz. We still don't know the target clock speeds for the Seattle cores, but the embedded roadmaps AMD has released show the ARM embedded part actually targeting a higher level of CPU performance (and a higher TDP) than the Jaguar core itself."

Comments

Re:Despite it's name

[hairyfeet]

Which is why I don't get this chip. After all they have the Jaguar for ULV applications, Opteron for when you need more horsepower, what good are these ARM units?

And I'm sorry ARM fans but as we keep seeing ARM just doesn't scale, you bump up the IPC and you blow the power budget, which is why I've been saying for awhile that days of "ARM Mania" will be quickly coming to an end. Folks want their handhelds to perform like an HTPC in their pocket and that means high instructions per second which ARM can't do without blowing through the power. This is why Nvidia is up to 5 cores, Samsung to 6, because ARM just doesn't scale. Its gonna be easier for AMD and Intel to cut X86 down with jaguar and Atom than it is to get ARM to scale.

So I just don't get what the market for this is exactly. Most server code is X86 anyway, be it wintel or Linux, so you are talking about some serious expense porting it over and with jaguar on the low end and Opteron on the high? Well i just don't see a huge market for ARM servers, am I missing something?