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Comment by lvl155 | Hacker News Reader

Are we peak ARM yet? Jokes aside, with coming decline in x86, why is AMD so slow to introduce ARM products?

>with coming decline in x86

What indication is there that x86 is on the decline? Intel might be on the decline, but AMD seems to be doing fine, and Windows on ARM looks to go nowhere, even with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon

AMD has an entire line of ARM chips and there's an ARM in every x86 CPU they make. They've been making ARM chips for a long long time.

https://www.amd.com/en/products/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/soc....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processo...

I assume the question is why AMD is not making EPYC or Ryzen processors with Arm cores for the application processors.

AMD continuing to have the Xilinx line of FPGAs with some Cortex cores and having Arm management cores that run firmware doesn’t really address this.

AMD said in 2021 that they were ready to build ARM chips[1], but honestly, I don't see the market for it. AMD could put an ARM frontend on Ryzen (and various interviews said they've prototyped it), but I don't think it would make a significant difference in compute/watt or whatever other metric, and there's not much in the way of ARM only software that people want to run. Maybe macOS, but you can still run that on amd64 afaik.

amd64 is still the default platform for desktop and server software. You can have arguments about the ISA, but for the most part that doesn't actually matter; amd64 is good enough, upstart cpu makers choose ARM not because it's better than amd64, but because it's at least good enough and licenses are available.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-we-stand-ready-to-make...

Also worth noting that AMD is doing quite well on the server market with the c cores in terms of compute per watt over ARM options.

I don't think ARM cores doing system management stuff that's not exposed to the user as a general purpose CPU really counts. But those SoCs count for sure, I didn't know they made those.

I don’t think x86 as an ISA is necessarily declining much and AMD has products with zen4c / zen5c compact cores intended to compete with Arm server products. AMD doesn’t have to pay licensing / royalties for x86 AFAIK and probably would prefer to keep x86 and not start paying arm and creating any adoption barrier form a change of ISA (however small) if they can make competitive x86 cores.

Because people are (mass generalisation) mostly only buying Arm to save money over x86. For AMD to get into Arm would be to kill their profit margins. Same curse that Intel had.

What ARM core is available for AMD to use that is better than what AMD has been shipping in Turin?

Adapting Zen to a simpler-to-decode architecture would cost more than licensing a core from ARM. The Zen 5 front-end is adapted for working around deficiencies of x86 with dual-decode SMT craziness.

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