
AMD Will Build 64-bit ARM based Opteron CPUs for Servers, Production in 2014 - skept
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6418/amd-will-build-64bit-arm-based-opteron-cpus-for-servers-production-in-2014
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zdw
AMD is no stranger to using busses and sockets that are compatible with
"other" hardware.

The original Athlon was bus-compatible with DEC Alpha chips - some logic
boards could take either with a firmware upgrade.

Also, there have been FPGA's that slot into Opteron logic boards (Celoxica
made one around 2006), and various other chips that connect directly to the
hypertransport bus as accelerators.

It remains to be seen what they'll do with this. Will it be a Xeon Phi
competitor (lots of cores, high thermal footprint) or something aimed at lower
end uses.

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mtgx
Finally, AMD is embracing ARM. It just might be the only thing to save them,
but only if they are flawless in execution, and Nvidia and others already have
years of head start in working with ARM chips.

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krasin
They have SeaMicro: <http://www.seamicro.com/> And given Nvidia has never
tried to do anything on the server, it might be that AMD is already ahead of
many others.

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spartango
Nvidia ships quite a bit of Tesla hardware for GPGPU data center use; Amazon
just bought a massive shipment of these racks for use through AWS.[1]

What's notable about Nvidia's Tesla offerings is that they sit as a separate
1-2U rack on top of the compute box. The space and power costs of operating
Nvidia GPGPUs in a datacenter are nontrivial.

If AMD ships a solid ARM product with some good on-die GPGPU components, that
might compete with Nvidia, but otherwise the two are in different spaces even
within the server world.

[1] [http://vr-zone.com/articles/amazon-orders-more-
than-10-000-n...](http://vr-zone.com/articles/amazon-orders-more-
than-10-000-nvidia-tesla-k10-cards-k20s-to-follow-/17340.html)

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tmurray
Tesla boards haven't shipped in a separate 1U form factor for a few years;
they're all passively-cooled PCIe boards inside a x86 server chassis now.

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mrb
Actually both setups are possible. Sometimes vendors put the Tesla PCIe cards
in a separate chassis, and link the chassis to the host via a PCIe cable, eg.:

<http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-c410x/pd>

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stefantalpalaru
Shut up and take my money! Give me 64+ cores at an affordable price and my
next build will keep you in business, AMD.

~~~
daniel-cussen
This is exactly what I like about AMD's strategy--they say more cores is
pretty much all that matters and, you know what? I think that's true.

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bryanlarsen
In today's marketplace, there's very little about the ARM instruction set that
makes it better suited for low power applications. Yes, it is a saner
instruction set than x86, requiring less silicon to convert into uOPs, but the
difference is trivial in 2012.

The difference between x86 and ARM on the power/performance curve is almost
purely due to design choices and trade offs. So why not create a new low-power
x86 core instead of a new ARM core?

The only way this makes sense to me is for this to be a stepping stone into
the mobile market. The mobile market is definitely stepping up the
power/performance curve, and AMD's experience with GPUs may be a distinct
advantage for them in the mobile market in the future.

~~~
jbarham
> In today's marketplace, there's very little about the ARM instruction set
> that makes it better suited for low power applications.

So it's just a coincidence that ARM powers 95%+ of smartphones? I think not.

Given Intel's advantage in fabs and process technology I think it's all the
more striking that to date they have failed at developing chips to effectively
compete with ARM in the mobile market.

x86 is an ugly and inefficient ISA compared to ARM but it didn't matter as
long as users plugged their computers into the wall.

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bryanlarsen
"So it's just a coincidence that ARM powers 95%+ of smartphones? I think not."

ARM designs have been optimized for low power. x86 designs have been optimized
for high speed. It has little to do with the architecture and lots to do with
the design.

Nobody has ever tried to design a sub 1 watt x86 design. Nobody has ever tried
to design a 100 watt ARM.

Only very recently have we had anything that's close to comparable. Medfield
has a similar power rating to high performance ARM designs, and similar
performance.

~~~
yvdriess
Intel tried the low-power x86 with the Atom, didn't really go anywhere. It's
true that scaling up an ARM will be equally problematic. But, the point is
that they use ARM because they don't want to push the power envelope.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Atom didn't go anywhere because it was a 10W processor benchmarked against
100W processors when running performance tests, but compared to 1W processors
when doing battery tests.

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kapitalx
Nvidia's Project Denver [1] is very similar. A 64-bit ARM based CPU for
servers that they started working on a few years ago.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver>

Edit: It seems the announcement from AMD is in response to this announcement
from Nvidia, the 2014 date also matches:
[http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20120921010327_Nvid...](http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20120921010327_Nvidia_Develops_High_Performance_ARM_Based_Boulder_Microprocessor_Report.html)

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wcchandler
I love this announcement for no other reason than I've been predicting a large
influx of ARM architecture into the server market. It makes a lot of sense.
More importantly I believe it'll be large multi-core SoC clusters. This is the
very logical transition. While a lot of our software doesn't fully utilize
multiple processor support, our OSes are becoming a lot better at scheduling
and are almost eliminating the impact of a context switch.

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frozenport
I don't see why AMD can do ARM better? AMDs strengths compared to Intel are in
its APU and the number of cores they can cram on an x86.

I think they confused the market, severs, with the technology they actually
have - x86.

Their biggest asset is the existing infrastructure and people to build x86 -
there are 2 companies that can do this: Intel and AMD.

~~~
vidarh
The problem is that there _will_ be a market for ARM servers for the simple
reason that power and core density is becoming a bigger and bigger part of
total hosting cost and ARM does low power well. AMD would be ignoring that at
their peril. They're much more vulnerable to this than Intel since they're
currently not generally the preferred high-end choice for most people.

~~~
TheCondor
Is ARM still lower power when dialed up to perform?

I think there are some interesting possibilities, especially with the bursty
nature of web traffic but there is also still a noticeable performance gap
between ARM and x86.

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Breakthrough
Now this is some interesting stuff. I wonder if they have any plans to make a
dual instruction-set processor that can run both x86 and ARM-based operating
systems... That's the kind of crazy design that just might work ;)

Aside: I wonder if it's possible to have one processor core with an ARM
instruction set, and another with x86 - obviously, reading from different
[segmented] memory locations, albeit simultaneously. I just wonder, since they
mention in the article the new Opteron _cores_ are designed by ARM, but the
rest of the processor indeed will follow AMD's design.

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ek
It's interesting that are actually a processor licensee, as the article notes,
and not an architecture licensee - in other words, they aren't designing their
own core around the architecture, but instead using an ARM design. With
Bulldozer AMD really started utilizing the many fab facilities that they have
around the world, and this should continue that.

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justincormack
Interesting how they position it as one third of an ARM x64 GPU strategy. GPU
is still the dark horse if we get serious general purpose programming. GPU and
ARM works once sequential performance is not the selling point. ARM
instruction set on GPU could work too.

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smegel
A potent sign of times to come...

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sliverstorm
A comment empty of content...

