AMD is no stranger to using busses and sockets that are compatible with "other" hardware.<p>The original Athlon was bus-compatible with DEC Alpha chips - some logic boards could take either with a firmware upgrade.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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?<p>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.
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.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver</a><p>Edit: It seems the announcement from AMD is in response to this announcement from Nvidia, the 2014 date also matches: <a href="http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20120921010327_Nvidia_Develops_High_Performance_ARM_Based_Boulder_Microprocessor_Report.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20120921010327_Nvid...</a>
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.
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.<p>I think they confused the market, severs, with the technology they actually have - x86.<p>Their biggest asset is the existing infrastructure and people to build x86 - there are 2 companies that can do this: Intel and AMD.
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 ;)<p>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 <i>cores</i> are designed by ARM, but the rest of the processor indeed will follow AMD's design.
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.
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.