AMD to ship 64bit ARM based SoCs in 2014
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Breaking with its long history as an x86 pc chip maker, AMD is to design 64bit ARM based processors for multiple markets, starting with cloud and data centre servers.
The first ARM based processor will be a 64bit multicore SoC optimised for the dense, energy efficient servers that now dominate the largest data centres.
The first ARM based AMD Opteron processor is targeted for production in 2014 and will integrate the AMD SeaMicro Freedom supercomputer fabric.
"AMD led the data centre transition to mainstream 64bit computing with AMD64, and we will again lead the next major industry inflection point by driving the widespread adoption of energy efficient 64 bit server processors based on both the x86 and ARM architectures," said Rory Read, president and ceo, AMD.
Jimmy Pike, vp and senior fellow of the Dell Data Centre Solutions group, described the availability of 64bit ARM solutions as an 'essential milestone' needed to accelerate enterprise adoption of the technology.
"With its planned 64bit ARM solutions, AMD brings the experience of a proven enterprise cpu provider to the ARM ecosystem," he commented. "ARM has the promise of being a serious player in areas like web front end servers and as a worker node in a Hadoop environment. AMD's opportunity is to deliver serious value in performance per dollar and performance per watt where low power server platforms running massively scale out workloads can shine."
