$65m write-down, ARM chips ship: A 90-second guide to Planet AMD

Mayday, mayday. Flight AMD 8086 going down !

It's all about the servers

This is why it's essential that AMD gets back into the server chippery space - What client device people use is irrelevant (and it's trending more towards mobile every day) - the 'cloud' still needs massive numbers of cheap commodity servers. If AMD can make a viable ARM based server SoC (and all the hard work is in the interconnects/IO not the cores) that can run big clusters as well as Intel but cheaper, they’ve won a truly big prize. I’m no fan of market monopolies and Intel’s dominance – let’s not forget that a decade ago, Intel was resting on their laurels – on a truly appalling product (NetBurst and insanely hot running single core CPUs) and it was AMD that jumped off into dual core, and later quad core first. They also extended IA32/x86 for Intel while Intel were still fobbing off the world with Itanium.

Here’s to some competition and a fresh way of engineering products. I wish them well with their ARM based server SoCs.

ARM is possibly a sensible choice

..pity they haven't a clue on anything else. AMD are going nowhere.

Their desktop and server chips are sub-par, except at the low end where the integrated GPU is better than Intel's offerings. Their discrete GPUs are substandard compared to Nvidia at the medium end, and not cheap enough or revolutionary at the higher end.

I can see they're trying to push HSA, but the timeframe on that means nothing will be seen before the end of 2016. It also isn't being taken seriously, as HSA will not be used in their high end workstation and x64 server chips.

TSX isn't on the roadmap as far as I can see, and Intel has now released chips where it actually works. There's absolutely no innovation in virtualisation, which is utterly unforgivable - if ever there was an area AMD could innovate in, it's virtualisation.

Even without any hardware changes, AMD could integrate its existing GPUs with virtualisation, better than Nvidia. I'm aware that they're doing something with virtualisation, and have been for a year or so, but there is absolutely naff all to show for it on x86. I presume they're concentrating on ARM VM, as there's a lot of work being done on that by various companies and projects.

They could integrate an ARM core with a Radeon chipset for consumer level devices and a more open architecture than the current market. No sign of that, either.

HBM is a neat trick, but hardly revolutionary, like AMD being the first to implement PCI-e 2.0 and 3.0 interfaces on their GPUs. Neat, but absolutely pointless, as the prior generation interface wasn't being saturated.

> "(Lost count: the number of times Su and her chief financial officer Devinder Kumar said "successfully executed" on the conference call.)"

Grief they're like those weirdos on The Apprentice.

re de facto monopoly

It always was a monopoly, at least until very recent.

Owning the fabs esured they could be just enough ahead to rake in all the cash stifling most fab development elsewhere.

But for Arm we would stll be on 28nm plus, ARM chips driving fab development at both TSMC and Samsung.

After they had forced Intel to retain legacy instructions it 64 bit chips by preempting them with their own 64 bit chip they should more or less have abandoned the PC market and focused fully on mobile. Too late now of course. They threw a spanner in Intel's works and then should have done a runner.