Legendary Chip Architect, Jim Keller, Says AMD ‘Stupidly Cancelled’ K12 ARM CPU Project After He Left The Company: https://wccftech.com/legendary-chip-architect-jim-keller-say...
Could be a revival but for different purposes
replies(7):
Could be a revival but for different purposes
Would make much more sense to compare with Qualcomm trajectory here as they dominate the high end ARM SoC market.
Basically AMD missed the opportunity to be first mover on a market which is now huge with a project Apple proved to be viable three years after the planned AMD release. Any way you look at it, it seems like a major miss.
The fact that other good decisions in other segments were made at the same time doesn’t change that.
AMD cannot go and tell its customers "hey we are changing ISA, go adjust.". Their customers would run to Intel.
Apple could do that and forced its laptops to use it. Developers couldnt afford losing those users, so they adjusted.
I don't think this is a fair position. It could as well be that focusing in K12 would have delayed Zen, maybe delaying it enough that it could have become irrelevant by the time it got to market.
Remember that while Zen was a good CPU, the only reason it made as much impact as it did was because it also was released in a good time (when Intel was stumbling with 10nm and releasing Skylake refresh after Skylake refresh).
Nobody supports the new ISA because there is no SoC and nobody makes the new SoC because there is no support. But in this case, that’s not really true because Linux support was ready.
More than forcing volumes, Apple proved it was worth it because the efficiency gains were huge. If AMD had release a SoC with numbers close to the M1 before Apple targeting the server market, they had a very good shot at it being a success and leveraging that to success in the laptop markets where Microsoft would have loved to have a partner ready to fight Apple and had to wait for Qualcomm for ages.
Anyway, I stand that looking at how the stock moved tells us nothing about if the cancellation was a good or a bad decision.
But all of this is a decade before what we are discussing here. I didn’t even remember XScale existed at Intel while writing my first comment.
Apple proved that creating your own high end consumer SoC was doable and viable idea due to TSMC and could result in better chips due to designing them around your needs.
And which ISA they could use? X86? Hard to say, probably no. So they had RISCV and ARM
Also about Windows...
If PantherLake on 18A actually performs as good as expected, then why would anyone move to ARM on Windows when viable energy eff. cpus like lnl and ptl are available
Well yes, exactly, that’s the issue with arriving 10 years later instead of being first mover. The rest of the world doesn’t remain unmoving.
The thing about being broke is you may know about good opportunities but not have the resources to actually make use of them.
Thing is, those efficiency gains are both in hardware and software.
Will a Linux laptop running the new AMD SoC use 5 W while browsing HN like this M3 pro does?
I don't think AMD should be following Intel in markets outside x86. I want to see them go RISC-V with a wide vector unit. I'd like to see Intel try that too, but they're kind of busy fixing fabs right now.
But, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't spit on McDonalds 6 billions either and the soybean market is one of the fastest growing in the agrifood business, with huge volume traded, probably one of the most profitable commodity at the moment.
No man, apple basically had the power to frog march it's app devs to a new cpu arch. That absolutely would not have happened in the windows ecosystem given the amount of legacy apps and (arguably more importantly) games. For proof of this you need look no further than Itanium and windows arm
If most Intel hardware makers had gone full ARM, they would simply have lost market share. Apple customers are going to buy Apple hardware—whatever it has inside.
But of course Apple controls not just the hardware but the OS. So ya, if only Apple hardware will run your application, you are going to port to that hardware.
Apple has a massive advantage in these transitions for sure.
How much of Qualcomm's profit comes from providing yet another ARM chip vs. all the value-added parts they provide in the ARM SoC's, like all the radio modem stuff necessary for mobile phones?
Now that's kind of a rhetorical question, not sure a clear answer exists, at least not outside Qualcomm internal finance figures. Food for thought, though.
(That's sort of the logic behind RISC-V as well. The basic ISA and the chip that implements it is a commodity, the value comes from all the application specific extra stuff tacked on to the SoC.)
Data centers and hosting companies are probably the biggest customers buying AMD CPUs, no?
If those companies could lower their energy and cooling costs that could be a strong incentive to offer ARM servers.
Microsoft's ARM transition execution has been poor.
Apple's Rosetta worked on day one.
Microsoft's Prism still has some issues, but at release its compatibility with legacy x86 software was abysmal.
Apple's first party apps and developer IDE had ARM versions ready to go on day one.
Not so for Microsoft.
Apple released early Dev Kit hardware before the retail hardware was ready to go (at very low cost).
Microsoft did not.
I think Apple would have switched anyway though. They designed Apple Silicon for their mobile devices first (iPhone, iPad) which I doubt they would have made x86. The laptops and desktops are the same ISA as the iPhone (strategically).
1% 3% 6% 10% 30%?
Agree. AMD stock was under $2 prior to Zen. Buying was a bet that Zen would be competitive with Intel in which case the stock would come back, otherwise they were doomed. The first Zen chips were in fact competitive but beat Intel in some benchmarks and lost in others. That would have brought back competition, but who knew Intel would flounder for many more years while Zen got a nice uplift with each generation! Delaying Zen would have been bad for AMD, but in hindsight that wouldn't have mattered so long as they could stay afloat til it launched.
Apple had already switched cpus in Macs twice, it's not surprising that they could do it again, but would they have switched from Intel x86 to AMD ARM when they never used any AMD x86? Seems unlikely.
Focusing on a product that would sell on day one rather than one that would need years to build sales makes sense for a company that was struggling for relevance and continued operations.
When the Microelectronics Group was transferred to Intel,
that included the StrongARM Group. A month later, everybody
in the StrongARM Group had pretty much quit.
From 2:03:30 he points out that the only purpose of the DEC lawsuit was to facilitate the sale to Compaq without the microelectronics group.
A huge amount of Apple's competitive edge is in the "other 90%", but they don't seem to get the headlines.
Today? Sure, they could probably sell some arm cpus; in 2017, doesn't seem likely.
I think you can get 95% of compatibility but the 5% of apps not running, even though they might be used once every full moon and there are alternatives, might be seen as a major blocker for a potential customer if he can still buy another computer with 100% compatibility.
The SoC is the SoC.
You can’t magically say "Qualcomm doesn’t make money from SoC which are commodities" and then argue "but actually they make money with the non commodity part because I want to somehow magically split in two something which isn’t splittable".
There is no real food for thought here. It is just a profitable market.
But the newer ones use even less and they're faster.