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.
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.
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.)
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.