Amd Could Enter Arm Market with Sound Wave Apu Built on Tsmc 3nm Process

>> AMD does not have any product that can compete with Intel's N-series or industrial Atom CPUs, which are designed for power consumptions of 6 W or of 10 W and AMD never had any Zen CPU for this power range

Nobody supports the new ISA because there is no SoC and nobody makes the new SoC because there is no support. But in this case, that’s not really true because Linux support was ready.

More than forcing volumes, Apple proved it was worth it because the efficiency gains were huge. If AMD had release a SoC with numbers close to the M1 before Apple targeting the server market, they had a very good shot at it being a success and leveraging that to success in the laptop markets where Microsoft would have loved to have a partner ready to fight Apple and had to wait for Qualcomm for ages.

Anyway, I stand that looking at how the stock moved tells us nothing about if the cancellation was a good or a bad decision.

Data centers and hosting companies are probably the biggest customers buying AMD CPUs, no?

If those companies could lower their energy and cooling costs that could be a strong incentive to offer ARM servers.

But all of this is a decade before what we are discussing here. I didn’t even remember XScale existed at Intel while writing my first comment.

Agree. AMD stock was under $2 prior to Zen. Buying was a bet that Zen would be competitive with Intel in which case the stock would come back, otherwise they were doomed. The first Zen chips were in fact competitive but beat Intel in some benchmarks and lost in others. That would have brought back competition, but who knew Intel would flounder for many more years while Zen got a nice uplift with each generation! Delaying Zen would have been bad for AMD, but in hindsight that wouldn't have mattered so long as they could stay afloat til it launched.

The thing about being broke is you may know about good opportunities but not have the resources to actually make use of them.

But, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't spit on McDonalds 6 billions either and the soybean market is one of the fastest growing in the agrifood business, with huge volume traded, probably one of the most profitable commodity at the moment.

I think Apple would have switched anyway though. They designed Apple Silicon for their mobile devices first (iPhone, iPad) which I doubt they would have made x86. The laptops and desktops are the same ISA as the iPhone (strategically).

Microsoft's ARM transition execution has been poor.

Apple's Rosetta worked on day one.

Microsoft's Prism still has some issues, but at release its compatibility with legacy x86 software was abysmal.

Apple's first party apps and developer IDE had ARM versions ready to go on day one.

Not so for Microsoft.

Apple released early Dev Kit hardware before the retail hardware was ready to go (at very low cost).

Microsoft did not.

If most Intel hardware makers had gone full ARM, they would simply have lost market share. Apple customers are going to buy Apple hardware—whatever it has inside.

But of course Apple controls not just the hardware but the OS. So ya, if only Apple hardware will run your application, you are going to port to that hardware.

Apple has a massive advantage in these transitions for sure.

Cameras used on x86-64 usually just work using that usb webcam standard driver (what is that called again? uvcvideo?). But these smartphone-land cameras don't adhere to that standard, they probably don't connect using USB. They are designed to be used with the SoC vendor's downstream fork of Android or whatever, using proprietary blobs.

See here: https://github.com/velvet-os/imagebuilder/discussions/240#di...

Acorn won the bid to make the original BBC home computer, with a 6502-based design.

Acorn later designed their own 32-bit chip, the ARM, to try to leapfrog their competitors who were moving to the 68000 or 386, and later spun off ARM as a separate company.

We will see how big improvement is it's successor panther lake in January on 18A node

>I would need some strong evidence to make me think it isn't the ISA that makes the difference.

It is like saying that Java syntax is faster than C# syntax.

Everything is about the implementation: compiler, jit, runtime, stdlib, etc

If you spent decades of effort on peformance and ghz then don't be shocked that someone who spent decades on energy eff is better in that category

Basically, x86 uses op caches and micro ops which reduces instruction decoder use, the decoder itself doesn't use significant power, and ARM also uses op caches and micro ops to improve performance. So there is little effective difference. Micro ops and branch prediction is where the big wins are and both ISAs use them extensively.

If the hardware is equal and the designers are equally skilled, yet one ISA consistently pulls ahead, that leads to the likely conclusion that the way the chips get designed must be different for teams using the winning ISA.

For what it's worth, the same is happening in GPU land. Infamously, the M1 Ultra GPU at 120W equals the performance of the RTX 3090 at 320W (!).

That same M1 also smoked an Intel i9.

That’s a blast from the past; native Java bytecode! Did anyone actually use that? Some J2ME phones maybe? Is there a more relevant example?