back to article AMD to partner with ARM for server CPUs by 2014

AMD and ARM have entered into a partnership that will see 64-bit ARM-based Opteron server processors appear from the Intel competitors, with release planned for 2014. "We look to disrupt the status quo," AMD CEO Rory Read told reporters and analysts at a San Francisco briefing on Monday afternoon. "We look forward, to drive …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hmm

    AMD licensed as chip maker for ps4

    AMD also a strong graphics card competitor

    ARM proven to be apt for SOC builds

    ARM also apt for parallel workloads (which the ps3 cell attempted)

    ARM also used on the PSVita.

    PS4 due in 2014

    64bit ARM powering the PS4? Doubtful, but one can hope.

  2. TeeCee Gold badge
    Facepalm

    Teh futures?

    "did not mean.........that ARM was the future and x86 the past."

    Meanwhile, Intel cross their fingers, look back at their decision to flog off Xscale and swear. Again.

    1. P. Lee

      Re: Teh futures?

      Intel look at their profit margins compared to ARM and pat themselves cautiously on the back while being slightly worried about the future...

      1. wowfood

        Re: Teh futures?

        Intel look at their profit margins compared to AMD and burst into fits of hysterical laughter.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Teh futures?

          "Intel look at their profit margins compared to AMD and burst into fits of hysterical laughter."

          Intel look at their dependence on the Windows-dependent market for the last decade and more, with no prospect of change in the future (negligible success with IA64. WiMax, I2O, etc).

          Intel board think "MS are OK, so we're OK".

          Hmmm.

  3. Bronek Kozicki

    as much as I wish the underdog to win ...

    ... special sauce for massive parallelism is not in inter-core communication alone. It is in a shift of programming paradigms from explicit synchronization towards transactional memory, implemented in hardware. This of course also affects inter-core communication in a sense that more robust cache synchronization is required. And this is one thing Intel seem to be doing right, in Haswell. I'd love to see similar change happening in other architectures or only just AMD, but sadly no sign of it so far :(

  4. implicateorder

    Hmm...low power, massively parallel processor-based servers?

    Sun/Oracle's Niagara platform anyone? Now also improved single-thread performance.

  5. panzerboy

    An ARM that can run x86?

    ARM has supported different op-code sets since the first Thumb instruction set in 1994. It may be a similar on-the-fly opcode translation that supports the Jazelle Java byte-code accelerator. No ARM licensee may do x86 opcode translation, except for AMD who holds a x86 license. Modern X86 processors are really RISC cores with a opcode translator at the start of the pipeline. So only AMD has the opportunity to combine a energy frugal ARM core with x86 instruction set. Such a processor wouldn't set the world alight in x86 performance, but may well be more energy efficient. It would also be cool-running, an important consideration when cramming together hundreds of cores in a hyper-scale server.

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