AMD announces ARM-based Opterons
AMD's Opteron brand is getting an ARM flavour, as the company licenses the 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set architecture.
Announced at an event in the US last night, the deal will see AMD become an ARM licensee for the first time with a deal to produce chips based around a 64-bit implementation of ARMv8, based on the ARMv7A instruction set architecture found in the Cortex-A15 'Eagle' IP but replacing the 32-bit-with-48-bit-addressing model with a true 64-bit implementation. Sold under the Opteron brand, the ARM chips will find a home in SeaMicro's microservers, using the Freedom supercomputer fabric interconnect to combine thousands of processor clusters into low-power high-performance systems.
The project has been in the works for a while now, with AMD quietly picking up a licence for the 64-bit ARMv8 architecture last year and working on the project in secret alongside the Cambridge-based semiconductor design giant. While the company has teased 'a variety of different products,' AMD has yet to come out and state whether or not it plans to produce consumer-oriented ARM chips in order to take on graphics rival Nvidia's Tegra system-on-chip (SoC) family.
'AMD led the datacentre transition to mainstream 64-bit computing with AMD64, and with our ambidextrous strategy we will again lead the next major industry inflection point by driving the widespread adoption of energy-efficient 64-bit server processors based on both the x86 and ARM architectures,' claimed Rory Read, president and chief executive officer of AMD, at the announcement. 'Through our collaboration with ARM, we are building on AMD’s rich IP portfolio, including our deep 64-bit processor knowledge and industry-leading AMD SeaMicro Freedom supercompute fabric, to offer the most flexible and complete processing solutions for the modern datacentre.'
Full details of the deal have yet to be released, but already the industry is coming out in support of AMD's partnership with ARM. Both Dell and HP have pledged their support for AMD's Opteron-branded ARM chips, with the latter going as far as to promise products based around the system. Linux giant Red Hat has also pledged its support, with the company's chief ARM architect Jon Masters promising to add Opteron ARM support to future revisions of the community-powered Fedora distribution.
The news will come as a blow for Intel, which is already showing signs of distress over the increasing success of ARM's ever-more-powerful chip designs. With Intel having long since given up its own ARM licence - obtained as part of its acquisition of parts of Digital Equipment Corporation in 2002 - AMD is uniquely positioned as the only major datacentre-focused semiconductor company to offer an ARM chip. Should the design gain traction, it could put real pressure on Intel's lucrative server market share.
For now, however, Intel has a while before it has to start worrying: AMD has no plans to release the Opteron ARM chips before 2014.
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Discuss in the forums ReplyTotal codswhallop...
Are Intel strong in the PC gaming market? Yes.
Can ARM handle many day to day tasks? RasPi does browsing and word processing to an adequate degree and can playback at HD quality and it uses an old cortex... so again yes.
How long until ARM delivers x86-64 performance? Well this one's a stumper, particularly as "x86-64" is a pretty wide open goal a quick google points out that the first was the AMD Opteron... I couldn't quantify it, but I'm pretty sure that if someone did some testing comparing a top of the range ARM chip with an old K8 then ARM would come out on top. Conversely compare the same ARM chip to a high end Intel or AMD product and I'm sure we'd see it brought to it's knees. It's a bad first statement, not what I'd term codswallop, but he hadn't properly defined his terms.
ARM, efficient? Again, yes, again.
ARM, over-clocking? Yet again, yes; jumping back to the RasPi, it's ridiculously easy in Rasparian, open up a txt editor, enter the clock speed you want, and if it's possible then it's there on your next boot.
Water cooling an Arm chip? Well, it's a bit silly due to the aforementioned efficiency. But whatever floats your boat.
As is said above, AMDs saving grace is that they recognise the need to deliver a good product at the low end. Both with this licensing agreement and their APUs. What Intel give is is useless Atoms. They were no good when they came out and still suck &#/¤ IMO. Will they be better in 12 to 18 months once they get an inegrated GPU, erm, no. It will be woefully underpowered and will provide so little GPU muscle the machines with them in will struggle with showing the Metro start screen.
Many users are finding significant gains using heatsinks and quiet fans on our RPis. I would certainly consider a integrated peltier and water cooler! Oh hang on, that kills the power efficiency a bit doesn't it!?
I've tried OC'ing my SGS2 before to see how well that would run with higher clock speeds and that did cause it to get very hot, hence I suggested water cooling, and the reason I'd want to try it on a desktop chip is because I believe that it would be easier to get a good water cooling kit for a desktop setup lol...
but power efficiency is still more important to me than higher clock speeds, OC'in is just a hobby when I've got a few hours to spare, and when I'm done I restore most settings back to their defaults...