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

[MrEricSir]

Jaguar is for tablets and seems to be designed for price point and not speed. That's why they are comparing it with the ARM stuff and not using an Opteron 6386 as a comparison.

The question is whether Jaguar itself is really 64-bit, or if it's just the graphics processor that's 64-bit and the rest is 32-bit.

Re:x86 IS efficient

[luminousone11]

1 byte?, you have no idea what you are talking about. AMD64 has a prefix byte before first op code byte, so in 64bit mode no instruction is smaller then 2bytes, Also 64bit arm is a new instruction set, and it does not in any way resemble 32bit arm. The fact is 64bit ARM, looks much more CISC'y then 32bit ARM, providing access to multiple address modes for load instructions, integrating the SIMD instructions rather then using costly co-processor extensions, having lightly variable length instructions, dedicated stack register and access instructions, And in a huge break from prior arm instruction sets they drop the conditional execution instructions from the instruction set. And it manages to increase the register count from 16 to 32 to boot as well. ARM has a bright future, It is not forced to waste huge swaths of transistors on decoding stupidly scatter brained instruction encodings built from 40 years of stacking shit on top of shit.