AMD pins future growth to embedded marketplace AMD has announced a new range chips for embedded devices, and said it hopes that 20 per cent of its revenues in Q4 2013 will come from that market, rather than the 5 per cent currently. Embedded chips are one prong of AMD's new pitchfork of profitability along with servers and ultra-low power tablet chips. The chip giant is …
While I hope they achieve their target the good way, I think the sceptics are probably right on x86 in tablets and phones — there's too much NDK stuff out there for many Android-using manufacturers to make the switch and a lot of them, along with Apple, are now used to being able to license embeddable components and design their own silicon. It's not that the architecture is always going to be behind in speed or power, just that the ship has already sailed.
You are correct. It's common knowledge that AMD are working on a 64-bit ARM chip and I reckon that using their APU expertise to produce a SoC based on that is a given.
While the use in mobile devices is obvious, I reckon the heavy grease for that is in low-powered servers. Maybe with the capability of GPU compute use of the integrated graphics cores?
As I've observed before the big plus for them in this area is that, if 64-bit ARM proves to be a winner in that market, it's something that Intel can't respond to very quickly. It'd be something of a novelty for them to have a winning product line that doesn't get steamrollered by Chipzilla in short order.
These SoCs have a broad market application and AMD already has contracts so it's all good IMO. AMD has a lot of good new products coming to market all at once with Kaveri, Richland, these SoCs, some new discrete GPUs and Steamroller for desktop is not too far off. Everyone of these products should prove to be a good value and performance proposition, which is what OEMs and mainstream consumers look for.
It is nice to AMD getting more and more profit but on the other hand, I...don't really like their current business plan. Kaveri is also allegedly (www.brightsideofnews.com/news/2013/3/5/amd-kaveri-unveiled-pc-architecture-gets-gddr5.aspx - sorry, still under 100 posts) going to be welded to the board along with its GDDR5 memory and GPU. I'm not sure I understand the whole thing correctly, but I think this is a much more closed architecture than the Phenom computer I have at home meaning it's "upgradability" would be limited to the level of laptops'. If I misunderstood it due to my pessimism about modern development of modern technology, please tell me before I lose all of my loose hope (if that makes sense, heh).
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