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rick.merritt
Pontikakis
AMD has announced that they are launching a new ARM Cortex-A57 64bit ARMv8 ...
Custom cores in the cards for AMD, ARM?
Rick Merritt
10/30/2012 10:34 AM EDT
The view from Facebook
There’s another ugly bit. AMD hopes to differentiate its 64-bit ARM server SoC with its time-tested SeaMicro fabric. The so-called Freedom Fabric has been working in products for more than a year, far ahead of ARM server SoC rivals Calxeda and Applied Micro. It can be used not only for connecting chips between boards but for connecting between chassis for data storage.
But ask Jay Parikh, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure, what he thinks of these hot fabrics and he’ll tell you he’s cold on them. “Proprietary fabrics are not something we are interested in,” he said in conversation after a panel session at AMD’s ARM server event.
Indeed, I have talked to Facebook engineers who said they want to use nothing but standard interconnects like PCI Express in their servers. They don’t even want Ethernet on server motherboards because it only makes it harder to upgrade rapidly changing CPUs.
Today, Facebook wants 2.5- to 2.7-GHz processors for its Web tier, which is just one of hundreds of workloads it maintains. That’s a fast pace for ARM server SoCs, but not out of range. Parikh said Facebook will not consider any 32-bit ARM designs—its software is all 64-bit--but left a door open about possible 64-bit ARM chips.
In the end, AMD took a historic step outside the x86 world today. But it leads down a pretty dark and twisting path for a company that isn’t packed for a long journey.
Related stories:
AMD to ship ARM-based server SoCs in 2014
AMD lays off 15 percent, eyes embedded push
There’s another ugly bit. AMD hopes to differentiate its 64-bit ARM server SoC with its time-tested SeaMicro fabric. The so-called Freedom Fabric has been working in products for more than a year, far ahead of ARM server SoC rivals Calxeda and Applied Micro. It can be used not only for connecting chips between boards but for connecting between chassis for data storage.
But ask Jay Parikh, Facebook's vice president of infrastructure, what he thinks of these hot fabrics and he’ll tell you he’s cold on them. “Proprietary fabrics are not something we are interested in,” he said in conversation after a panel session at AMD’s ARM server event.
Indeed, I have talked to Facebook engineers who said they want to use nothing but standard interconnects like PCI Express in their servers. They don’t even want Ethernet on server motherboards because it only makes it harder to upgrade rapidly changing CPUs.
Today, Facebook wants 2.5- to 2.7-GHz processors for its Web tier, which is just one of hundreds of workloads it maintains. That’s a fast pace for ARM server SoCs, but not out of range. Parikh said Facebook will not consider any 32-bit ARM designs—its software is all 64-bit--but left a door open about possible 64-bit ARM chips.
In the end, AMD took a historic step outside the x86 world today. But it leads down a pretty dark and twisting path for a company that isn’t packed for a long journey.
Related stories:
AMD to ship ARM-based server SoCs in 2014
AMD lays off 15 percent, eyes embedded push
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iniewski
10/30/2012 11:24 AM EDT
Highly puzzling strategy for AMD...you are #3 in a market where #1 is doing x86 and #2 is doing its own ARM cores...so you decide to do both???
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rick.merritt
10/30/2012 10:29 PM EDT
AMD is unique in that in can do both x86 and AMD, but as analyst Nathan Brookwood pointed out to me over lunch today, there's no great advantage to that.
Also, Nathan said he thinks there's no great advantage to designing your own custom core either given ARM is doing a pretty good and timely job covering the waterfront with its own designs.
Nvidia Tegra folks say Qualcomm, for example, went to a lot of trouble to design its own ARM cores but is not getting a huge technical advantage with them.
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plk
10/31/2012 9:06 AM EDT
Nvidia kind of has to say that...Qualcomm gets time to market, and at Qualcomm's volumes, that can justify the investment.
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MikeSmith2011
10/31/2012 12:18 PM EDT
Designing their own cores does make sense for them - otherwise they do not have any differentiation. I doubt the one-size-fits-all cores from ARM can address all the markets. I would suspect that ARM's own cores would likely want to retain dominance in the mobile space and are targetted to those market first. This is not to say that they cannot be used in servers but a dedicated server design would compete better.
Based on the news coming out of the ARM camp, it seems to validate this - almost all of them - AppliedMicro, Cavium, Qualcomm, nVidia are indicating they have their own core designs.
AMD does have decades of experience designing CPUs so that is their strength - the question is that of execution and focus when trying to ride two horses at once.
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Pontikakis
10/31/2012 6:16 PM EDT
AMD has announced that they are launching a new ARM Cortex-A57 64bit ARMv8 Processor in 2014, targetted for the servers market.
http://armdevices.net/2012/10/31/amd-makes-arm-cortex-a57-64bit-server-processor/
ARM is getting hot lately, and they do compete with INTEL on server-side thus, it is not a bad strategy that AMD wants to jump in and ride the waves of ARM. If they have a good execution plan, they can make it work.
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rick.merritt
11/1/2012 11:03 AM EDT
Take a look inside that new ARM Cortex A57 at
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4400351/ARM-A57-core-detailed-in-technical-session
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