AMD reportedly developing ARM silicon chip | Hacker News Reader

AMD reportedly developing ARM silicon chip

tomsguide.com

19 pointskristianp14 comments

> That’s because AMD could be making its own ARM-based chip. According to hardware leaker Mauri QHD, Intel is working on two M1 competitor chips.

> ARM isn’t a stranger to flirting with ARM-based chips

Just two examples of how poorly this is written. You'd think with the gross amount of ads in the article they could afford an editor.

I thought I knew my computer history... But why does the article say its IBM's x86 architecture?! If IBM owned that I dunno how Intel or AMD would be a company. (I do know that IBM made the PC and we have them to thank them for the clones which made the PC industry).

Edit: spelling

Yeah that's a rubbish claim. The x86 ISA is Intel's. The story goes that IBM considered different CPUs for the IBM PC, and we could almost have ended up with the Motorola 68000 instead of the Intel 8088. What a glorious future that would have been! Instead we're stuck with an instruction set for a CPU that was considered a stop-gap solution until Intel's "proper" new CPU was ready (the 432).

The CPU architecture is Intel’s, but the platform architecture, like the BIOS, the hardware features, etc., are IBM’s.

There’s basically nothing left from those days, but it’s still a thing that people say sometimes.

Note that AMD already uses ARM in their x64 CPUs, although not as primary cores.

These are mostly not user addressable CPUs and are used internally for management etc.

The Opteron A1100 processor that AMD was using for its ARM based server lines are not using any AMD In-House custom designed ARM cores they use the Arm Holdings Reference Design A57 cores and that's all for that SKU!

AMD did have Jim Keller, at the same time that Keller/His team where working on the Zen x86 core, also working on a Keller/Arm K12 team project for an AMD custom ARM K12 Core where that Arm core was essentially using the same design ethos as Zen but that the K12 custom core was engineered to Decode and Execute the ARMv8A ISA.

But AMD's K12 custom ARM core project was mothballed and that project placed on the back burners in favor of x86 based Zen. AMD still has the Verilog(Blueprints) for K12 as Keller/K12 Team where far enough along with that for that design to be considered completed.

This rumour was published Dec 4th and closes with:

> Mauri QHD said that AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su will have a presentation at CES 2021 on January 12, so we could hear more about AMD’s next chip reasonably soon.

This prediction has passed its due date.

Dr Su mentioned ARM in her interview with Dr Cutress: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15344/amd-at-ces-2020-qa-with...

> LS: So we already work with Arm in some of our microcontrollers on our designs and products. From a server standpoint, we are not investing in Arm at this point. We think that there’s a huge market out there for x86. I do think Arm has a market and capability, but from our standpoint the focus on x86 is the right thing to do. There’s a lot more we can do in the datacenter, and we have plans to stay with x86 and our EPYC portfolio, going from 2nd Gen EPYC and beyond.

Get the hell out, a SILICON chip? Are we sure it’s not a potato chip?

Also curious, I though ARM chips were essentially spec’d by ARM Holdings and you merely bought a license.

> Get the hell out, a SILICON chip? Are we sure it’s not a potato chip?

Could be a carrot or cucumber chip, who knows.

> Also curious, I though ARM chips were essentially spec’d by ARM Holdings and you merely bought a license.

No. Or not if you have the resources and will. You can license the whole architecture and modify it / rebuild it from scratch to your heart's content.

Some examples of architectural licensees that do their own thing are Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung...

... and Nvidia.

But that probably doesn't count anymore.

Do they have a choice? Apple has suddenly launched beast of a processor in the market which beats the AMD's and Intel's with top of the line battery backup and cheap price.

Competition needs to roll out something similar or the only reason people would buy AMD/ Intel based laptops is because of Windows experience!

Maybe not. See https://www.macrumors.com/2020/12/22/m1-mac-windows-parallel... .

This is not entirely correct. AMDs existing CPUs beat M1 quite comfortably.

Where M1 shines is power usage under load. That's what it's fanless, hence even longer battery life.

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