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Read, formerly of IBM and Lenovo exec and more of customer-focussed guy rather than an NIH traditionalist guy, told a conference this week:
“At the end of the day, it has to be market driven and by the customer. We have a lot of IP and a lot of capability. We’re going to continue to play those cards, but as you move forward, making sure that you’re able to be ambidextrous is definitely a winning hand.”
Last month an AMD spokesman stated: “We’re at an inflection point. We will all need to let go of the old ‘AMD versus Intel’ mind-set, because it won’t be about that anymore. Our strategy is to accelerate our growth by taking advantage of our design capabilities to deliver a breadth of products that best align with broader industry shifts toward low power, emerging markets and the cloud.”
That was taken as a hint that AMD and ARM are flirting.
Intel has been trying to persuade the mobile industry to use x86 processors for a decade without success. Even when Intel had ARM processors, it couldn’t get the mobile industry to use them.
But people aren’t afraid of AMD screwing the mobile industry as Intel has done with the PC industry.
AMD making ARM processors makes intuitive ‘gut’ level sense to me.
AMD took someone else instruction set to the processor market once before. ARM is trying to learn the server business, AMD can help them. AMD needs an ‘angle’ versus Intel in server and it needs other newer markets to plunder after missing the shift to mobile 1st time around.
My big question is – software ecosystem – without it a processor is all but useless. ARM has one of course, but not one designed for servers…so will AMD invest in the enabling sw ecosystem for ARM based server products? It’s a big ask…and AMD will want a lot of surety before making that commit. I wonder what they’ll ask for?
Geoff
With so much of backwards compatibility Intel has to maintain, you cannot be surprised, that the x86 bas become too complicated. I do not think that Intel has screwed the PC industry, quite the contrary.
Maybe the switch to some more efficient instruction set architecture will (e.g. with binary translation) happen quite quickly.
Interesting news, that’s sure, the only Intel’s rival in PCs.
Intel’s ARM processors were not really designed for mobile use.
Intel bought the StrongARM design from DEC and, as the name indicates, this was designed to give higher performance than other ARM designs at the time (which _were_ targeted towards mobile use). Intel continued this with Xscale, which was designed for embedded use such as in network switches. Eventually, Intel’s ARM IP was sold off to Marvell, which already had ARM designs of their own.