AMD’s K12 ARM CPU Now In 2017

by Ryan Smith on 5/6/2015 2:00 PM EST
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  • Samus - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link

    2017? Damn.
  • MartinT - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link

    Maybe AMD should consider dropping a few projects, this one included, until they get their core businesses, x86 CPUs and GPUs, back in shape?
  • eanazag - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link

    They can't afford to drop this project in investors eyes. AMD brings legitimacy to ARM on desktop and server. That being said, AMD's plain ARM chip being behind is sad and obviously ties up development efforts. They need to get the first one out the door and poach some Apple employees too.

    It makes more sense for AMD to push for x86. It is a tried and true market. People would buy AMD x86 CPUs for consumer and enterprise if the stuff wasn't 4 years old and too slow to justify even with pricing. I want to buy AMD, but I can't justify their stuff with any reasoning.
  • spikebike - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link

    @MartinT AMD has a suite of problems. Seems mostly related to their board following the hype and not making clear engineering and business decisions. They ditched the previous CEO who was doing quite well and had turned AMD around and made them profitable. The board did this because they "must be in smartphones/tablets", even though they couldn't answer the CEOs question about how to make such an attempt profitable.

    So they ditched their FAB, and now much use FABs that follow the most profitable chips. Sadly that's not ideal for competing with Intel. So now AMDs in a position where they don't match performance or performance per watt. Intel's stopped innovating on performance of their CPUs and GPUs, all have only seen very small improvements. A 3+ GHz quad core sandybridge isn't that different than a 3+ GHz quad core broadwell. Nor has GPU performance increased much from the HD4600. For normal use cases the sandybridge, ivy bridgbe, haswell, and broadwell have only made small incremental improvements in performance (clock rate, ipc, or ipc per clock). Intel has been pushing hard on performance per watt though.

    So without being able to beat Intel AMD can't charge much for a CPU. FABs are optimized for things like smartphone CPUs which are not designed to compete with Intel's laptop/desktop chips.

    Sadly the APUs and GPUs don't seem to be doing much better, and AMD drivers don't seem nearly as good as Nviida's. The more heavily you use your GPU (professionally or for gaming) the more likely you are to end up with a Nvidia GPU. This is particulary sad because AMD has access to the same fabs that nvidia does, so they don't have a handicap of a few generations of process improvements.
  • testbug00 - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link

    Intel's performance increases slowing down are due to them only having a really advanced micro-architecture where all the "low and medium hanging fruit" has always been picked. Anything to increase performance from Intel is very expensive and challenging. Lowering power at the same performance now, that has more low/medium hanging fruit (at least, it did, I think Intel has gotten most of it by now) allowing for large improvements.

    As for drivers and Nvidia/AMD... That's FUD from 4 years ago on the consumer side. The drivers are more or less the same, either slightly favoring Nvidia or even.
    On the professional side Nvidia has better drivers, but, more importantly, they have a lot better industry support. Although, AMD is making progress.
  • przemo_li - Monday, May 11, 2015 - link

    Actually, AMD APUs have better perf (gpu/games wise) then competing Intels.

    And Intels recent iGPUs are weak cause of too low heat room. Meaning they would do better (in notebooks where it matter) if only had better cooling. So OEMs choose baseline models.

    Fails happen.

    Though if one took Your words as "Intel stagnated a bit in APU space recently, AMD can outdo them in single gen still", then its correct. AMD can still put good chips that would fight with Intel offerings on performance terms.

    Now lets see if:
    a) they can put out better perf APUs
    OR
    b) DX12/Vulkan change PERCEIVED performance (meaning - cheaper AMD chips suddenly provide same FPS as expensive Intels, so why bother with blue?)
    OR
    c) Software momentum for HSA start to provide clear and tangible results in software people use everyday

    So AMD do have some attack angles. Lets see if something pan out this year!
    (I bet Vulkan, followed by HSA)
  • TheinsanegamerN - Tuesday, May 17, 2016 - link

    Iris pro in broadwell beat out every AMD APU according to this very site.
  • Dmcq - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link

    I think what AMD is doing is right. The ARM server market won't be worth much in 2016 but they need something there to develop the market and form a presence, it doesn't have to be anything too wonderful though. As to the future depending on x86 would be to continue a losing strategy. I believe the ARM architecture will deliver a worthwhile improvement in performance over x86 with the same development effort and so can give AMD an edge rather than always pricing down and trying to fill gaps. They already have experience in enterprise computers and customers who know them so have that advantage over other ARM chips. Also it provides them with IP for developing chips like for the games machines they've done.
  • MrSpadge - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link

    Seeing the extremely quick and impressive progress ARM made moving from A57 to A72 I think AMD should simply put A72 cores into a A1100 successor in 2016. Afterwards they can still evaluate whether K12 still makes sense.. or whether ARM already passed them with whatever they have by then.
  • beginner99 - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link

    Exactly my thought. This Seattle thing is already late. By then the first A72 will probably already be available. And K12 is 2 years out. Must be a monster or else there is little hope.
  • KAlmquist - Wednesday, May 6, 2015 - link

    Is there any indication of the intended performance of K12 relative to Zen? Since they are developing it in concert with Zen, it would make sense that the performance of the two cores would be similar, but I haven't seen anything from AMD saying that.
  • gamerk2 - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link

    You can't compare ARM to X86 like that; ARM CPUs simply don't have the building blocks X86 CPUs have fine tuned for decades now to improve performance. That's why the best ARM chips match Intel Atom, at best.

    As ARM CPUs scale up, they're going to have major performance/power problems, simply because they aren't as fine tuned as X86 is. That's why I view AMDs move into ARM as being a major mistake. They missed the growth phase, and they're competing now against two different companies (Intel and Qualcomm) instead of just one.
  • KAlmquist - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link

    I don't know what you mean by building blocks.

    If you are talking about corporate know how and intellectual property, there is certainly a difference between the dominant x86 company (Intel) and the main designer of ARM cores (ARM Holdings). But Zen and K12 are being designed by the same company. If the performance goals for Zen and K12 are the same, I would expect them to perform similarly.

    What I don't know is whether the performance goals are the same, or whether AMD has decided to make one of the designs higher performance than the other.
  • SleepyFE - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link

    My 2 cents: AMD is to late to the ARM race. Intel is in Surface tablets, that are finally good and Microsoft dropped Windows RT for the most part (it is still used, just not mentioned). They need to stick to their guns and just work on x68-64 and get the power down to phone form factor like Intel has. They should also license the phone CPU IP to give it more traction (something Intel will never do).
  • HisDivineOrder - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link

    They want to see if Zen makes it so they don't have to focus on ARM. If Zen fails or isn't a huge success, then they can fall back to their ARM-based chips. If Zen is as amazing as they hope and has success to match, I think AMD may reconsider ARM plans, especially given nVidia's slow backtracking away from ARM.

    ARM just isn't the Paradise of Promise that it once seemed to be.

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