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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I don't see AMD's play here. What value do they add with a processor that they don't design, don't fab, and can't produce in the kind of volume tablet and phone chips get produced?

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It's possible that this is their first foray into ARM with a core license to get a feel, and their next iteration will be with an architecture license (which they can get some design value add).

I don't understand your comment. "Doesn't design and doesn't fab" describes every ARM licensee. Also, this chip isn't going anywhere near phones or tablets. Did you look at the specifications?

The other ARM licensees have a hook: Qualcomm integrates with its LTE base bands, Apple builds a phone around it, etc. The phone/tablet angle is important because the high volumes in those markets help justify big design teams at Qualcomm and Apple.

ARM designs the "IP core" of the processor but doesn't fab anything themselves. AMD brings their own SOC design and fab process.

AMD is fabless, so what they bring is an SOC design. But what can they offer in an SOC other companies can't? I guess Hypertransport?

System level design, integration with gpgpu. Inspite of being dwarfed by Intel in the x86 space I would imagine AMD has the engineering bandwidth to compete with the current arm based designers - qualcomm and samsung.

Rumor is that Apple's design team is bigger than AMD's at this point.

Apple isn't thinking about entering the OEM SoC market though.

Apple is in a league of their own.

Perhaps they are fabless for the moment, but that might not last forever.

See here:

http://m.bizjournals.com/albany/stories/2006/06/19/daily53.h...

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/-1-Billion-In-NYS-Funding-For-...

http://www.saratoga.com/news/amd-chip-plant.cfm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Forest_Technology_Campus

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/other/display/20130904235756_Gl...

Those are all old sources, if I recall correctly AMD spun off there fabs to GlobalFoundries then recently divest their stake.

Radeon gpu cores. We already see Qualcomm Adreno gpus doing well and they are a fork of old ATI blueprints that AMD sold them.

AMD's hook is servers + GPU.

Why does a server need a GPU?

ImageMagick.

AMD has actually donated some nice amount of engineer-hours to enable ImageMagick to use OpenCL. And the difference is massive.

So if you have a webservice that allows users to upload images and then subsequently processes the images it's cost efficient to purchase few AMD APU's instead of massive Intel Xeon server.

There are a lot of other things to do, but Imagemagick is something that has support for it right now.

Non web/db servers are often CPU bound, often CPU bound processes are doing parallelizable computations well suited to GPUs.

OpenCL server farm.

Machine learning.

They seem to be aiming this at the server market: the volumes will be lower than tablet and phone chips.

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