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283 points walterbell | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.671s | source
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stevefan1999 ◴[] No.45768818[source]
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

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high_na_euv ◴[] No.45769959[source]
Funny how some of his projects got cancelled like K12 at AMD or Royal Core at INTC and people always act like that was terrible decision, yet AMD is up like 100x on stock market and INTC... times gonna tell
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StopDisinfo910 ◴[] No.45771119[source]
Seems completely uncorrelated with what is discussed especially considering Intel didn’t enter the ARM market either.

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.

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1. daemin ◴[] No.45771221[source]
Intel specifically exited the general-purpose ARM market back about 20 years ago when it sold its XScale division to Marvell. I believe it kept making the ARM chips for use in network controllers and other specific purpose chips.
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2. StopDisinfo910 ◴[] No.45771353[source]
Intel failed to anticipate the smartphone revolution despite RIM being a customer of XScale. To be fair, they only entered because they got StrongARM from a law suit settlement with DEC in 1997 and they sold to refocus on more strategic segments which turned out to be actually a lot less interesting. I don’t think Intel can really be seen as a model of good strategic thinking.

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.

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3. throwaway173738 ◴[] No.45772299[source]
Intel has made and killed ARM socs since then. Like Keem Bay.
4. kevin_thibedeau ◴[] No.45774951[source]
Allen Baum has some inside baseball on this:

  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.
https://youtu.be/wN02z1KbFmY?si=Gnt4DHalyKLevV2p

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.