AMD could enter ARM market with Sound Wave APU built on TSMC 3nm process

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

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

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.

Apple has way stronger leverage than AMD when it comes to forcing "new standards" lets say.

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.

It’s a chicken and egg problem.

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.

>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.

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