Understanding AMD's roadmap and new direction

http://www.anandtech.com/print/5503

by asto • 14 years ago

39 4 14 years ago

bedris• 14 years ago

I think it may be smart that AMD is focusing on easily-producible SoCs in products designed for emerging markets. Might be a better way to differentiate themselves than going head-to-head on performance.

drewcrawford• 14 years ago

Back when I was working there (warning: not the statements of my employer), the sentiment I heard most often was that if AMD specialized in, say, servers, Intel would just sell the servers at a loss and make it up on the other 10 businesses. And so therefore AMD had to have a product to compete with every single Intel product. As a result of hearing that so often, this article surprised me greatly. It's a major shift for AMD.

I wonder what has changed? Reading between the lines I think AMD may be prepared to do the same thing to Intel. Assuming that AMD can figure out how to do ARM well, perhaps it can sell all the x86 chips at a loss and make it up on ARM (since Intel only does x86). If ARM really is the future (warning: I have no idea what the hell I am talking about), perhaps AMD is thinking that the cash cow patent monopoly of x86 isn't worth fighting for anymore.

tsewlliw• 14 years ago

They are probably stretching too far with the virtual ISA, but unified address space for CPU/GPU would be pretty amazing.

Symmetry• 14 years ago

Here's the previous Hacker News discussion about AMD and ARM's pans for a virtual ISA: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2684766

Understanding AMD's roadmap and new direction

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