AMD is Ambidextrous, Not Married to Any One Architecture, ARM in the Datacenter?

We've been hammering this point home all day, but AMD just mentioned it again. The company wants to be a solutions provider, one that's ambidextrous and not married to any one architecture. AMD is likely talking about ARM here and seems willing to offer both ARM and x86 based SoCs depending on the market segment/customer requirements.

What's important to note is that thus far AMD has talked about these ambidextrous solutions with respect to the datacenter and not client systems, and definitely not smartphones. If you were looking for AMD to get into the ARM based SoC race in phones, that's not what's going to happen. An AMD architected ARM based enterprise solution is interesting though. It's unclear to me what the main advantage of ARM would be there, particularly given that AMD has its own low power x86 core with Bobcat, but it's an interesting notion.

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Intel’s 2011 Investor Meeting - Intel’s Architecture Group: 14nm Airmont Atom In 2014

Today Intel is holding their annual investors meeting at their Santa Clara headquarters. In true Intel fashion it’s being treated as a big event (ed: it’s so big they ran out of lunch), as this is the company’s primary vehicle for addressing the investors holding their 125 billion dollars in shares; in essence it’s a reprise of their current and future technology plans as a pep-talk for investors. As such it’s not really a technical event, but it’s not uncommon for a few new technical details to shake out during the presentations.

There are a number of presentations throughout the day. For AnandTech readers, the Intel Architecture Group is undoubtedly the group to watch, as if something is going to shake out it’s bound to be the architecture group. Today they didn’t disappoint, and while we didn’t actually get anything new in terms of architecture, we did get some new roadmaps. We learned about the Silvermont Atom last week, and today Intel has confirmed its existence along with providing a name and date for its successor, Airmont. Airmont will be Silvermont’s 14nm successor, and will be released much sooner than we’re accustomed to: 2014, the same year the Intel launches that new fabrication process.

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Intel's Silvermont: A New Atom Architecture

Brooke Crothers broke a very important story today - he published the name Silvermont. Atom's first incarnation came to us in 2008 as a Pentium-like dual-issue in-order microprocessor. The CPU core was named Bonnell, after the tallest point in Austin at around 750 feet. Small mountain, small core. Get it?

Bonnell and the original Atom were developed on a 5-year cadence, similar to how Intel ran things prior to the Core 2 revolution (the P6 to Netburst/Pentium 4 move took 5 years). With the original chip out in 2008, five more years would put the next major architecture shift at 2013, which happens to be exactly when the Cnet report mentions Silvermont will be introduced.

When I first met with the Atom design team they mentioned that given the power budget and manufacturing process, the Bonnell design would be in-order. You get a huge performance boost from going to an out-of-order architecture, but with it comes a pretty significant die area and power penalty. I argued that eventually Intel would have to consider taking Atom out of order, but the architects responded that Atom was married to its in-order design for 5 years.

Intel's Moorestown - same Atom core, just more integrated

Since 2008, Atom hasn't had any core architecture changes. Sure Intel integrated the GPU and memory controller, however the CPU still communicates with both of them over an aging FSB. The CPU itself remains mostly unchanged from what we first saw in 2008. Even Intel's 32nm Atom due out by the end of this year doesn't change its architecture, this is the same dual-issue in-order core that we've been covering since day 1. The 32nm version just runs a bit quicker and is paired with a beefier GPU.

Silvermont however changes everything. It is the first new redesign of the Atom architecture and it marks the beginning of Atom being on a tick-tock cadence. Say goodbye to 5 year updates, say hello to a new architecture every 2 years. Read on for more!

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