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.
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.
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?