http://liliputing.com/2013/09/amd-goes-ambidextrous-will-produces-arm-x86-chi...

Pronounced "Hero Falcon" the first ARM shot out of AMD's gun is going to be a BIG one.   AMD is going 64 bit from the very get go with the A57 cores and they are starting out with a workstation/server/BIG PC buttload of 8 each A57's right off the bat.



AMD envisions itself looking like this at the end of 2014 .....



One hopes that AMD survives to make this future plan come true.  This roadmap also explains why they have curtailed some new x86 products that were under development -- Hierofalcon (a version mounting a intergrated video chip) would likely be a potential replacement for a lot of the mid to upper PC style chipsets that exist today.   Nope, see the next post -- they plan to exit retail space completely fairly quickly.

Bulldozer (8 cores of x86) was not that successful for AMD last year because the task scheduling wasn't advanced enough at the time to make it ramp seamlessly enough.   It wasted energy and computing cycles and got whupped by Intel's 4 and 6 core units for real performance.

I think Samsung is currently taking the BIG/little ARM intergration software throught the second part of its development cycle, so the ARM schedulers should be pretty well worked out for AMD by the time AMD hits silicon with the 8 each big A57 cores on their first product.

Cost is the main thing, ARM chips tends to be cheaper to produce than x86 cores as they can run competitively at a larger lithography level than the competeing x86 requires while offering the needed performance and extra energy savings.  

RISC computing is like that, simpler instruction sets, fewer pipelines needed, smaller footprints and less energy used.

Intel is getting better though ....    Chipzilla always shines better when under the gun -- they can't be all lazy and just keep doing same same -- they have to STRETCH some more on each tick and tock of their one year timed development cycle.

2014  ---  The year of 64 bit this and that.  

This is the year the PC gets buried under the new mass of tablet type stuff that will do the jobs the PC used to do.


Perhaps this is the year of the NEW OS as well -- you got folks trying to do more of that now that MS has become a hardware and services company.   They sense the time is right for a new set of operating systems to come out of the woodwork ....

You see, Microsoft intends to become an Apple closed type ecology, their own private OS on their own locked down hardware --- we will see how that all works out for them, what with them asking you for $100 per year just to keep all their stuff up to current.

 
Intel's next generation of tablet and laptop chips are starting to ship now, coming off vapor status where they have remained for the last 2 years.   Each has undergone redesign twice as events caught up with and overcame the original design.   

They are called Haswell for the laptop and Bay Trail for the tablet.   They are proving out to be approximately twice as good as previous Intel chipsets in both energy efficency and "market aimed" processor power.

This does not put them winning over ARM's efficency levels in all of those areas, but it puts them in much closer competition.   Close enough, in many folks point of view, and for laptops those many folks now include Google, who has switched the Chrome OS notebooks over to Haswell chipsets (for the better top end "plugged in" power).

However,  with them becoming real AMD has now taken a deep cut in the carotid artery zone with all of their current low energy chips having now become instant third class citizens in the ongoing energy/performance wars in laptop/tablet space.  

Intel is going to quickly take AMD's market share with these clearly superior products. 

AMD has no announced plans to come out with any drastically new commercial chips at this point in time either ....  unless they can bend Hierofalcon over to help them out some competitively  they are going to be exiting this market inside the next year or so whether they want to or not.

The Intel vs ARM frog blender is just now starting to get into their direct blade to blade (product against product) conflict, and already Texas Instruments and several others have left the field.   ARM is going to exit as fast as they can, going over into the same embedded space the others have run off to.

Freescale has just announced two new generations of very low power ARM chipsets that signals they will remain in play for another year, but please understand that Freescale is MOSTLY into embedded stuff already, their foray into commercial space is an expansion effort of existing embedded plans that can work on commercial products on the very low power end.   Their market share in commercial space will be tiny in any case.   AMD will soon be in the same boat as Freescale.

AMD must wiggle their way much deeper into server and embedded space, and to do so they must displace some of the Texas Instrument and IBM and Freescale and some others who made the move 2 years ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKh68YfQYkE


This one tickles me because I own the Galaxy SIII phone and it was a two year old CHEAPIE phone when I bought it nearly a year ago.

Apple, how far hast thou fallen ???


.... the real grin and giggle part of it is the Apple loyalists are still camping out in line in major cities for 24 hours for something they can have freely anytime in the next few days as the era of "not enough" chips is way way way OVER now ....   been so for well over a year now.  

Any shortage that you see now is an intentional marketing ploy to prop up "too high of an initial price".   So yeah, Apple still has to have "shortages".    So does Microchoke.