AMD is working on K12, brand-new x86 and ARM cores

http://techreport.com/review/26418/amd-reveals-k12-new-arm-and-x86-cores-are-coming

by AnthonyMouse • 12 years ago

96 54 12 years ago

Update: http://techreport.com/review/26418/amd-reveals-k12-new-arm-and-x86-cores-are-coming

AMD has given the ARM core the code-name K12. I'm not sure whether that name also applies to the x86 core.

I hope not. They would be doing themselves a disservice by trying to confuse their customers by calling 2 very different chips the same (which they're already doing with their upcoming ARM server chips). Don't try to "hide" the ARM cores behind the x86 chip brand, like you're ashamed of them. OWN them. Be proud of them and what they can deliver for the power/performance/cost (and if there's nothing to be proud of, then why bother making them?)

duskwuff2• 12 years ago

Similar, in a sense, to the mistake Microsoft made (IMO) by naming two very different products "Microsoft Surface".

MichaelGG• 12 years ago

Three, if you include the table PC.

axman6• 12 years ago

Or the third Xbox the Xbox One...

anonymfus• 12 years ago

Read original source (http://www.amd.com/en-us/press-releases/Pages/ambidextrous-c... ), it's directly specified that it's a name for ARM core.

jevinskie• 12 years ago

Here is the updated story: http://techreport.com/review/26418/amd-reveals-k12-new-arm-a...

dang• 12 years ago

Thanks. We changed the url.

rodgerd• 12 years ago

Interesting to see the common socket proprosal - this harks back to the days when AMD's x86 chips were sharing a slot with the DEC Alpha (although I'm not aware of anyone ever making a motherboard that could host either processor).

spitfire• 12 years ago

I had one which, with a bios change was supposed to be able to run an Alpha.

Fun fact, the board - the Asus K7M, came out at a time when Intel was putting pressure on vendors not to support the (brand spanking new) AMD Athlon. The vendors were so scared that the first few shipments of K7M boards came in plain white boxes, without a reference to the manufacturer anywhere in site. Not even the fine print.

Already__Taken• 12 years ago

This must still go on. Someone brought me a Samsung laptop an its processor made no mention of AMD anywhere. even in the pc management. It just reports as a quad core cpu.

msandford• 12 years ago

This might well be the beginning of the end for x86 as we know it. The power advantages of ARM in the server space may not be as significant as in the mobile space but that doesn't mean they're minuscule.

There's a lot of code out there which already compiles to multiple architectures so that's one less objection. The rise of the open-source movement (and source-based distribution) have enabled this to happen on a wide scale.

Since the barriers to entry for a new architecture have fallen (and AMD intends to lower them further) it wouldn't surprise me if in a decade x86 is as much of a novelty as ARM was decade ago.

taspeotis• 12 years ago

There's a lot of code out there which already compiles to multiple architectures so that's one less objection

Yeah and there's a lot of code out there which has already been compiled to x86, the vendor has gone out of business, and isn't getting compiled again.

k4st• 12 years ago

And that's what emulation and binary translation are for! :-P

tormeh3• 12 years ago

Like what? Games? Contrary to enthusiast opinion, games have a pretty short life for most people. Doubt that will be a problem. What kind of enterprise is going to run software without a maintainer? I can't come up with anything else than games for which this is a relevant scenario.

sjwright• 12 years ago

True, but that code isn't exactly a driver of new hardware sales.

dspillett• 12 years ago

Yes, but if you are still using such binaries they themselves are a serious risk to your business in other ways.

Backwards compatibility is good for transitions, but when you are using it to mitigate risks due to dead companies you are using a technical solution to fix something that is inherently a business/people problem.

userbinator4• 12 years ago

I don't think ARM really has any inherent "power advantage" over x86; this paper might be interesting to read:

http://research.cs.wisc.edu/vertical/papers/2013/hpca13-isa-...

Yes, ARM architecture is simpler so AMD might stand a better chance, but I'm not so sure how they'll manage to make ARM cores reach x86-level performance and per-cycle efficiency. Currently in cross-architecture benchmarks like SPEC (which doesn't seem to have any ARMs in it at the moment -- hopefully this will change), x86 is at the top for per-thread, per-clock performance and at least a factor of 2-3 away from the next-best - which was POWER7, if I remember correctly.

And given that x86 has tons of intra-instruction optimisation opportunities that Intel are taking advantage of because it's such a rich CISC, and ARM doesn't ("enhanced REP MOVSB" is the first example that comes to mind)... personally, I'm not too optimistic. Either way it will be really interesting to see what happens, particularly the benchmarks.

Symmetry4• 12 years ago

Quite true, the one ISA advantage that ARM has it's that it's much easier to decode. That does make a difference, but it's not a huge factor. On the other hand x86 tends to be a bit more compact but not as much as you might think.

ISA doesn't make a huge difference here, but Intel currently has a pretty big lead in both process and architecture. Either because of superior research, the ability to impose more constraints than a merchant silicon house can, or both Intel has been reaching new process nodes sooner and getting better performance on them than their competitors.

And Intel currently has a big architecture advantage too. Owning the whole PC market gives you the money to hire a lot of good engineers. It might be that there's a second disadvantage to x86 in that it's complicated enough that you need more engineering to get an equivalent architecture. I say this because IBM has managed to keep parity despite the fact that, IIRC, they're able to invest less engineering. Power 7 had higher single threaded performance than anything Intel had when it came out, and it looks like Power 8 is doing a similar leapfrog. If you look at SPEC int_rate and divide by the number of threads you'll find that Intel comes out a factor of 3 better today and 2 when Power 7 came out, but that's due to IBM having 4 threads per core to Intel's 2.

In theory there isn't anything preventing an ARM-64 chip from having performance as good as an x86 or POWER chip, but in practice Intel and IBM have a lot of experience in designing high performance chips but ARM doesn't. AMD sort of does, but they haven't been executing well at the high end recently and these will be their first ARM cores.

*http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/cpu2006.html

auselen2• 12 years ago

'I don't think ARM really has any inherent "power advantage" over x86'

paper states ~ISA being CISC or RISC doesn't matter... performance differences are generated by ISA-independent microarchitecture differences".

So being ARM or x86 matters for "power advantage", but being "CISC or RISC" doesn't.

ternaryoperator• 12 years ago

"This might well be the beginning of the end for x86 as we know it."

That would require that Intel to stand still with its Atom line. I'm quite sure that Intel, with its well-known corporate paranoia about the marketplace, will continue to compete in low-power x86 technology. Even if AMD delivers on this hybrid with a good product, I expect they'll still have a helluva fight from Intel on their hands.

rdtsc• 12 years ago

Just thinking about it superficially (and in general not just server market) it seems ARM is eating Atom's lunch. Atom has to try very hard to cut into mobile market. I can see maybe netbooks, kiosks but how big is that compared to smart phones.

Now in the lower power, micro-server/blade market I can see how Atom might be a good competitor to ARM for the software that can't compile to ARM easily. But I am also not sure how big that market is.

With virtualization and containerization a large powerful Xeon machine carved into hundreds of containers might be just as good or even better.

InclinedPlane2• 12 years ago

x86 is unlikely to go away any time soon. I could see a world where ARM was more prevalent for consumer devices, but that's only a fraction of computing power. Servers are going to be x86 for a while, there's just too much of a power differential there. And high end workstations and gaming systems, including gaming consoles, are going to be x86 for years and years.

It'll be interesting to see what happens with Intel's x86 SoC stuff in the near future. They have the capability to be competitive with ARM, and some mobile devices (like smartphones) are already x86 based.

neolefty• 12 years ago

Are you assuming that an x86 core is more powerful than an ARM core? That may be true historically, but only because ARM implementations were optimized for watts and x86 for compute. I think AMD is talking about optimizing ARM for compute as aggressively as x86, and that should (theoretically) make it slightly faster than x86, because the ARM design is more, having learned the lessons of CISC and RISC and all that.

TheCondor• 12 years ago

Intel is really good. Really really really good, I have a hard time dismissing them but the ability to buy from many vendors and build custom hardware is compelling. I felt this way before about powerpc but there seems to be more compelling community support for arm this time around, the installed base of mobile devices makes a huge difference. It seems to me that intel has been lazy exploiting their performance edge, if amd and others start selling inexpensive lowish power arm 8 and 12 core systems that can legitimately hang with intel then I think they'll have some serious competition. Especially as the niche vendors start making 32 and 64 core chips, assuming they can keep the prices decent.

It could be very interesting if a Dell, for example, starts to get in on the game, they're already attempting to be solution vendors. Perhaps targeted arm core start being built, like storage centric designs for SAN type systems and network processors will fall out pretty quickly, all with fundamentally the same isa and just different accelerators for different domains. That something intel has always been against.

happycube• 12 years ago

They can't replace Bulldozer fast enough.

tormeh3• 12 years ago

The second generation had pretty good value for money. It's a bit long in the tooth now, but you make it sound like it was bad when it came out.

Symmetry4• 12 years ago

Sure, AMD had to price them so that they were competitive. From a consumer standpoint there were good potential reasons to buy them. From AMD's perspective, those were big chunks of silicon being sold for far less money than what Intel was able to charge for something that cost as much to manufacture. I doubt they made back their development expenses on them, though thankfully AMD had a lot of other products that worked out better.

DiabloD32• 12 years ago

Let me shove 60 of these into 4U, 10gbit to each blade, redundant switches in the chassis itself with multiple 40gbit uplinks, and give each blade m.2 slots instead of 2.5" drive slots, and let me shove 64gb of memory into each blade.

If AMD can't get a vendor to build these this year, I don't see a future for AMD.

Yes, and I'm aware this is probably 6000w peak into 4U.

Edit: You can downvote me all you want, but this is what Intel is already planning on rolling out through Dell and HP in the 2015 time frame. This much has already been reported on links that hit HN's front page.

sliverstorm• 12 years ago

Maybe they would put them in something like this?

http://www.seamicro.com/sm15000

They get 256 low-power Atom cores in there, that's about 100 chips per 4U?

DiabloD32• 12 years ago

I find AMD's ownership of Seamicro confusing, especially since they still sell Intel CPUs. Also, those are not server Atoms and very old.

Most likely what future systems will look like will be clones of HP's Moonshot chassis (which that is a clone of Sun's Thumper, doing blades instead of HDDs).

AMD is working on K12, brand-new x86 and ARM cores

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