

Understanding AMD's roadmap and new direction - asto
http://www.anandtech.com/print/5503

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bedris
I think it may be smart that AMD is focusing on easily-producible SoCs in
products designed for emerging markets. Might be a better way to differentiate
themselves than going head-to-head on performance.

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drewcrawford
Back when I was working there (warning: not the statements of my employer),
the sentiment I heard most often was that if AMD specialized in, say, servers,
Intel would just sell the servers at a loss and make it up on the other 10
businesses. And so therefore AMD had to have a product to compete with every
single Intel product. As a result of hearing that so often, this article
surprised me greatly. It's a major shift for AMD.

I wonder what has changed? Reading between the lines I think AMD may be
prepared to do the same thing to Intel. Assuming that AMD can figure out how
to do ARM well, perhaps it can sell all the x86 chips at a loss and make it up
on ARM (since Intel only does x86). If ARM really is the future (warning: I
have no idea what the hell I am talking about), perhaps AMD is thinking that
the cash cow patent monopoly of x86 isn't worth fighting for anymore.

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tsewlliw
They are probably stretching too far with the virtual ISA, but unified address
space for CPU/GPU would be pretty amazing.

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Symmetry
Here's the previous Hacker News discussion about AMD and ARM's pans for a
virtual ISA: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2684766>

