AMD denies killing off big cores (Kaveri, Steamroller, and Excavator)
semiaccurate.com
semiaccurate.com
"Updated 11/19/2012@10:15am: AMD contacted us with an official denial of the story and stated that Kaveri and the big cores are still on track."
The chip might look more like Piledriver than expected, but it will have some Steamroller bits and will probably be called Steamroller.
New computer to be built next year.
Intel of course is going to resist ARM and low power computing for one huge reason - profit. There are only so many machines sold each year and switching to ARM doesn't sell more processors for Intel. So, switching to lower perf and lower power processors like Atom means Intel can only sell them for $20-30 vs. $100-300 for a core i3/5/7. That is why Atom hasn't been pushed by Intel on mobile, it would destroy their whole business model. You can't drop billions into manufacturing if you don't have the revenue and profits to fund it.
AMD's future is going to look a lot more like nVidia's current plan than Intel's.
With their fabs and engineering talent, they'd still be strong leaders in terms of IPC, core counts, computing density, performance per watt, etc.
The dynamics would be similar to AMD vs Intel today. Charge double for a 50% lead, 5x as much for a 100% lead, etc. When marginal performance is important, the premium is gladly paid.
While they'd have countless fabless design companies competing with them for the low end, few if any companies will be able to compete toe to toe at the cutting edge. Maybe IBM - who else?
While a shrinking percentage of the market is fitting in that high performance bucket, I would hazard a guess that the absolute numbers are still going up, if only because of server chips and gamers. Though I could not find any data on this and would be happy to be proven wrong.
It is interesting to understand the 'Intel monopoly' [1] and how it came to be. I worked at Intel in the mid-80's and basically IBM 'created' a personal computer market by bringing their reputation to the market, Microsoft provided the software, and rigid compatibility was demanded by the market to maximize software re-use (software and training has always been the biggest 'cost' of switching instruction set architectures). Early on Intel was cross licensing that 8086 architecture with partners to get market share against the 68000 architecture but later they clawed back a lot of the licenses.
The requirement that is be 'windows compatible' created a giant moat around the x86 instruction set architecture. That moat wasn't officially breached until the early 2000's when AMD announced their Sledgehammer (aka Opeteron) AMD64 architecture. Here was an architecture that was not Windows compatible (windows didn't really support 64 bit chips until Windows 7) and yet AMD managed some big design wins in servers because of Linux and OEMs who could adapt quickly to the new extensions. Intel finally caved and shipped the AMD extensions in their own chips, even though they knew it was probably the end of the Itanium as a viable product.
Now AMD announces an ARM server chip, they have some expectation that it will gain some market share because they did it with Opteron. They are even calling it an Opteron perhaps as a nod to that history. They will be able to innovate in the peripheral chips because all off the 'bets' are off in terms of what has to be in the 'south bridge'. They can do more creative memory interconnects because they aren't constrained by folks expecting the Intel stuff.
And here is the interesting thing, there are easily 10x the ARM licensees than the x86 licensees. That pretty much guarantees a lot of competition and price pressure.
The strategic questions are these:
Can AMD establish a 'server' standard? Something like the PC spec but for ARM chips, a minimum set of things that will always be there and a way to find out what optional things are there. This enables shipping a generic kernel that boots on everything and customizes itself to the environment.
Can AMD survive the ingress of a number of other players earlier in the life cycle rather than later. If they are getting traction expect competitive chips in 12 months rather than 24 or 36 months.
What is Intel's "Thermonuclear war" strategy and would they be willing to pull that trigger. Unlike Apple's Android antagonists, AMD is not well positioned to survive a huge litigation punch.
We'll see of course, the game is afoot as Sherlock Holmes would say. I'm hopeful that we crack this thing open and start innovating again.
So in conclusion I think that Intel is in a good position to beat ARM in their home field (cellphones, tablets). Can easily shield the low power desktop/ netbook market from ARM and has of course the dominant position for high powered processors. So I simply do not see a bright future for ARM based (consumer) computing. ( That is not to say, that there are not niches for ARM, but Intel has the stronger position in everything the average consumer thinks of as computers.)
[1]http://www.anandtech.com/show/5770/lava-xolo-x900-review-the...
If that's true, then I don't see any reason to be using ARM Windows. iOS and Android are better in every aspect that counts, except for MS office.
This is why it pays to have a visionary CEO, one that can feel where things are moving years ahead of the others, instead of a mere "manager". Transitions to disruptive markets can literally kill your company if you're not doing it on time. By the time a "pragmatist" manager - one that looks only at present data - realizes what is going on, it's already too late.
Flawless execution for the switch to ARM may not be enough. They may need a good differentiation strategy, too. If they knew they would do this, it may have even paid off to be the ones buying the MIPS architecture. The ARM market is starting to consolidate right now, and I'm not sure there will still be room for AMD's stock ARM CPU's (and probably stock GPU's too?) by 2014.
The problem is, you only ever find this out with hindsight.
OTOH I expect AMD will do pretty well in the lightweight thread server market. They've got server experience and infrastructure, they've got a decent low-power x86 core, and they've spent of lot of time thinking about having cores with different instruction sets living together.
And given the recent sales figures that 70-80% of CPU sales are coming from APU, the APU is rasiing, CPU is a shrinking business, it makes sense for AMD to consolidate and make that 80% better and slightly more profitable rather then trying to complete with an aggressive Intel.
I think the bigger problem is just that it's extremely difficult and expensive to compete with Intel on x86. And all of a sudden the x86 market has taken a turn toward lower growth and lower margins. So, really, why would anyone bother when it's cheaper to get into the mobile/low-power ARM race and those markets have so much more up-side and room to make advancements that aren't contingent on billion dollar foundry investments?
It's almost certainly not transferable to the extent allowed by law, given the trouble Intel caused just over AMD spinning off their fab business.
Amen. Intel's process advantage alone is a big challenge.
It's a very strange move for AMD. The A15 chips they're developing are roughly in the same performance & power markets as modern Atom-class chips.
Another way to think of this move is that AMD is betting the farm on the bet that mediocre CPU + fast GPU is a more compelling play than fast CPU + mediocre GPU. That might be a good bet, but it's too bad they no longer have the resources to take both sides of the bet.
http://www.quora.com/Which-companies-have-major-investments-...
In short avoid any PC with Intel and AMD CPUs.
You need to buy a laptop with ARM CPU ...
Shit! No luck! ARM also has office in Israel:
Welcome overpriced i9 or whatever will be the next generation.
Take this with a grain of salt, and file it into the "hrm, this might happen" category.
BTW: AMD makes low-end chips, maybe it is more perspective line for future development (power efficiency). Something like that happened with Pentium4 and Pentium3 Mobile.
On this one, it seems to be AMD causing their own downfall by poor management decisions leading to bad engineering practices. There's a lot of talent over there that is going to waste.
[1] I believe AMD successfully sued them for this in the past, but that seems to be over and settled.
Ugh, should I grab an intel CPU now before the prices get jacked up due to monopolization?
Intel are not in a good position to be able to price gouge the market. There is a point that will be hit in the near year or two where an arm device with lots of ram will be worthy desktop environment. If intel tightens the screws it will just come faster. And although not a trivial task if the pain becomes way to much for the enterprise market we could see some massive efforts into x86 emulation on ARM.