AMD adds ARM to their Opteron Line
October 29, 2012 – In San Francisco, AMD held a press conference announcing thier licensing of the ARM 64 bit core IP to be part of the Opteron product line. Planned to initial introduction in 2014, the ARM architecture is to be a supplemental tool in their server solution space.
AMD x86 ARM Opteron Architecture
The architecture is that using the SeaMicro Freedom interconnect fabric, they will be able to address the cloud services, storage solutions and edge of network server applications with a single chip that has a 64bit multi-core x86 APU engine, the 64 bit ARM engine that are connected with the fabric. The goal is to address the server marketplace that is not focused on streaming and media – which is APU optimized, and not an HPC compute application which is optimized for x86 and APUs.
.As the distributed growth of smart end point devices grows, the need for these from end servers to deliver applications to the devices and also collect “unorganized” data from the devices will grow. The belief is that the ARM architecture will provide a more power efficient core for managing these tasks than the x86, and the appropriate function can be selected as needed.
While the announcement focused on the dual architecture, issues such as assembly level cross compilers, vitalization schema for both I/O and storage, and distributed memory access for multi-core graphics and the two architectures of core processing were not directly discussed. The implied interpretation is based on adoption of the HSA standards these issues will be addressed prior to the 2014 release date of the products.
This is the extension of the current A5 license from ARM which AMD has been using for encryption and security processing since early 2012. As the x86, APU and GPU products from AMD are on a mix of SOI and bulk processes, there was no indication which path for production the new part would take, other than the ARM cores were a standard softIP implementation license rather than an architectural license to AMD. The new A15 64 bit ARM ecosystem is currently supported by Linaro, HP, Dell and Red Hat. There is some overlap with also supporting x86 and APU products from these vendors. At this time there are no-cross compilation products for migration across platforms or for concurrent partitioning of the two processors architecture for any SMP application. There are some high level porting tools (for C family programs) provided they do not include any real time, assembly language or direct GPU addressable fucntions. The resulting applications only run on one of the processors types and do no allow programs to be split and distributed across multiple CPU types.
2014 is a while from now (1.5 process migrations, and many more multi-core applications from now), and the realization of the resulting server functions will have to wait to see what the silicn can provide, and if wafer fab capacity for the correct process will be available to launch the product on schedule.
