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It's somewhat sad that AMD can no longer compete head-to-head with Intel so they have to produce processors based on ARM designs. I'm really hoping that someon

It's somewhat sad that AMD can no longer compete head-to-head with Intel so they have to produce processors based on ARM designs. I'm really hoping that someone will compete with Intel on the high-end CPUs, maybe IBM's PowerPC?

Alupis 12y ago
It's not that they can't/won't compete (actually, when it comes to large scale virtualization, a 16 or 32 core Opteron is much more preferable over an 4 core or 8 core Xeon, and it's less expensive sometimes too). AMD is seeing the writing on the wall -- ARM is coming into the server market in a big way. It's way better power consumption to performance ratio. You can pack a lot more cores into a server and still consume less power, and at scale, they can compete with traditional dual CPU x86 machines. They are also cheaper to manufacture and purchase. A great many server companies are getting into ARM -- most notably HP. AMD has said this is a move for the 2016 market (at the earliest). I think it's the right move and welcome it.
- jandrewrogers 12y ago
  It really depends on the workload. For some use cases like databases or analytics, ARM is often less efficient than the latest Intel chip almost anyway you measure it. The increased operational throughput per CPU, which can be integer factors, offsets any differences in cost or power consumption. ARM's sweet spot has traditionally been for CPUs that are otherwise going to be underutilized, saving both power and CPU costs in those circumstances. As cloud platforms become better at ensuring maximum utilization of CPUs, and a larger portion of workloads become throughput intensive, it moves things a bit more in Intel's direction. ARM will probably find a better market in the Internet of Things than in the data center.
  - sounds 12y ago
    If that's true, not only is AMD wrong, so are all the other "datacenter ARM" entrants: HP, Dell, and Samsung to name a few. It's also unwise to cite the companies who tried and went bust (like Calxeda) since the tech is still very early. A large entrant may be able to establish a niche some time before a startup could do the same.
szatkus 12y ago
AMD was too long depended on melting PC market. Good that they're trying in other niches. BTW, they are planning to come back into HEDT in 2016.
- vadman 12y ago
  Both developments are being overseen by Jim Keller: http://news.softpedia.com/news/K7-K8-Inventor-Back-at-AMD-Prepares-Excavator-for-2015-441617.shtml http://news.softpedia.com/news/K7-K8-Inventor-Back-at-AMD-Pr...
tormeh 12y ago
It's impossible to really compete head-on. It's ridiculously expensive and even if your processors are better people will still buy Intel because of brand and relationships. AMD wants to swim in a pond which doesn't have Intel in it, and I don't blame them.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Interesting, except this is "head to head" with AMD. It is part of the reason Intel has been making massive investments across their portfolio to fend off ARM incursions. AMD showed with the original AMD64 architecture that they could "out compete" Intel, it was fascinating at the time to see Enterprise level folks having to choose AMD over Intel because Intel was insisting that if you wanted 64 bits you went with Itanium. But it also showed how futile it is to try to compete with them using an ISA and eco-system where they have all the advantages. Chip sets and front side busses and a million other ways that Intel keeps a lock on their bread and butter. ARM from AMD, means that to compete with them Intel either has to cut margins on their server chips to ARM levels, or make x86-64 server chips competitive. For a lot of places CPUs per cubic foot of rack space is an important number as the cost per month of a rack in a Colo (can be) fixed, the more stuff you can run in it while running at 80% power the lower your monthly cost per instance, and higher profit per instance. Getting a penny per core extra per hour per day can be a huge difference. So this is an opening salvo in the next battle. I am predicting it will be just as interesting as the time AMD showed the world you could do 64 bits in a 'commodity' processor.
- wsxcde 12y ago
  > eco-system where they have all the advantages Maybe this is what you're alluding to, but Intel used a whole host of anti-competitive practices to prevent AMD from gaining a foothold in the market at a time when AMD had faster and better CPUs. And this was part of the reason why AMD ended up buying ATI (IIRC they were after NVIDIA for a while) - they wanted another angle from which to attack Intel. But it seems like they overpaid for ATI, and then Barcelona happened and Bulldozer was delayed beyond belief and so the last few years have been very tough for AMD. Let's hope this gets them back into the game.
  - yuhong 12y ago
    Not to mention more importantly they did it at just the wrong time.
Qantourisc 12y ago
I'm already OK if they compete in the top 75%.
fidotron 12y ago
It is head-to-head. Assuming these chips come in TCO competitive for a decent proportion of workloads (and in theory they should be clearly better for enough) Intel will have to respond either with new technology, which they either have on a back burner or isn't there, or cutting costs, which will destroy their margins and R&D capacity. It's very hard to see how Intel can maintain their position here at all. Once that spiral starts they're stuffed, and normally the only outcome of such situations is to belatedly combine the competing product with your historic strength, so it seems inevitable Intel will be making ARM chips before too long, again.
- jandrewrogers 12y ago
  Intel's data center strategy for ARM is greater integration density. For example, in less than a year Intel will be selling a Xeon socket compatible chip with 72 Atom cores with the same power envelope as a normal Xeon server chip. And each core will have two 512-bit vector pipelines (AVX3?), so the throughput for compute intensive operations should be impressive. It will undoubtedly be expensive but if you look at the overall dollars per compute, and how many VMs and similar you could run on it simultaneously, it starts to look very attractive in terms of data center economics.
  - virtue3 12y ago
    And what's going to cool that chip? Liquid nitrogen? :/
wmf 12y ago
AMD Seattle will be competing with Intel Avoton/Denverton and it's not clear that there's any advantage to being ARM (other than "it's teh future"). The Tyan Power8 server running Ubuntu is coming. We'll have to see what the performance is.

Alupis 12y ago

It's not that they can't/won't compete (actually, when it comes to large scale virtualization, a 16 or 32 core Opteron is much more preferable over an 4 core or 8 core Xeon, and it's less expensive sometimes too). AMD is seeing the writing on the wall -- ARM is coming into the server market in a big way. It's way better power consumption to performance ratio. You can pack a lot more cores into a server and still consume less power, and at scale, they can compete with traditional dual CPU x86 machines. They are also cheaper to manufacture and purchase. A great many server companies are getting into ARM -- most notably HP. AMD has said this is a move for the 2016 market (at the earliest). I think it's the right move and welcome it.

jandrewrogers 12y ago
It really depends on the workload. For some use cases like databases or analytics, ARM is often less efficient than the latest Intel chip almost anyway you measure it. The increased operational throughput per CPU, which can be integer factors, offsets any differences in cost or power consumption. ARM's sweet spot has traditionally been for CPUs that are otherwise going to be underutilized, saving both power and CPU costs in those circumstances. As cloud platforms become better at ensuring maximum utilization of CPUs, and a larger portion of workloads become throughput intensive, it moves things a bit more in Intel's direction. ARM will probably find a better market in the Internet of Things than in the data center.
- sounds 12y ago
  If that's true, not only is AMD wrong, so are all the other "datacenter ARM" entrants: HP, Dell, and Samsung to name a few. It's also unwise to cite the companies who tried and went bust (like Calxeda) since the tech is still very early. A large entrant may be able to establish a niche some time before a startup could do the same.

szatkus 12y ago

AMD was too long depended on melting PC market. Good that they're trying in other niches. BTW, they are planning to come back into HEDT in 2016.

vadman 12y ago
Both developments are being overseen by Jim Keller: http://news.softpedia.com/news/K7-K8-Inventor-Back-at-AMD-Prepares-Excavator-for-2015-441617.shtml http://news.softpedia.com/news/K7-K8-Inventor-Back-at-AMD-Pr...

tormeh 12y ago

It's impossible to really compete head-on. It's ridiculously expensive and even if your processors are better people will still buy Intel because of brand and relationships. AMD wants to swim in a pond which doesn't have Intel in it, and I don't blame them.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Interesting, except this is "head to head" with AMD. It is part of the reason Intel has been making massive investments across their portfolio to fend off ARM incursions. AMD showed with the original AMD64 architecture that they could "out compete" Intel, it was fascinating at the time to see Enterprise level folks having to choose AMD over Intel because Intel was insisting that if you wanted 64 bits you went with Itanium. But it also showed how futile it is to try to compete with them using an ISA and eco-system where they have all the advantages. Chip sets and front side busses and a million other ways that Intel keeps a lock on their bread and butter. ARM from AMD, means that to compete with them Intel either has to cut margins on their server chips to ARM levels, or make x86-64 server chips competitive. For a lot of places CPUs per cubic foot of rack space is an important number as the cost per month of a rack in a Colo (can be) fixed, the more stuff you can run in it while running at 80% power the lower your monthly cost per instance, and higher profit per instance. Getting a penny per core extra per hour per day can be a huge difference. So this is an opening salvo in the next battle. I am predicting it will be just as interesting as the time AMD showed the world you could do 64 bits in a 'commodity' processor.

wsxcde 12y ago
> eco-system where they have all the advantages Maybe this is what you're alluding to, but Intel used a whole host of anti-competitive practices to prevent AMD from gaining a foothold in the market at a time when AMD had faster and better CPUs. And this was part of the reason why AMD ended up buying ATI (IIRC they were after NVIDIA for a while) - they wanted another angle from which to attack Intel. But it seems like they overpaid for ATI, and then Barcelona happened and Bulldozer was delayed beyond belief and so the last few years have been very tough for AMD. Let's hope this gets them back into the game.
- yuhong 12y ago
  Not to mention more importantly they did it at just the wrong time.

Qantourisc 12y ago

I'm already OK if they compete in the top 75%.

fidotron 12y ago

It is head-to-head. Assuming these chips come in TCO competitive for a decent proportion of workloads (and in theory they should be clearly better for enough) Intel will have to respond either with new technology, which they either have on a back burner or isn't there, or cutting costs, which will destroy their margins and R&D capacity. It's very hard to see how Intel can maintain their position here at all. Once that spiral starts they're stuffed, and normally the only outcome of such situations is to belatedly combine the competing product with your historic strength, so it seems inevitable Intel will be making ARM chips before too long, again.

jandrewrogers 12y ago
Intel's data center strategy for ARM is greater integration density. For example, in less than a year Intel will be selling a Xeon socket compatible chip with 72 Atom cores with the same power envelope as a normal Xeon server chip. And each core will have two 512-bit vector pipelines (AVX3?), so the throughput for compute intensive operations should be impressive. It will undoubtedly be expensive but if you look at the overall dollars per compute, and how many VMs and similar you could run on it simultaneously, it starts to look very attractive in terms of data center economics.
- virtue3 12y ago
  And what's going to cool that chip? Liquid nitrogen? :/

wmf 12y ago

AMD Seattle will be competing with Intel Avoton/Denverton and it's not clear that there's any advantage to being ARM (other than "it's teh future"). The Tyan Power8 server running Ubuntu is coming. We'll have to see what the performance is.