AmpereOne has been reportedly sampling since May 2022, launched in May 2023, and agot dopted by Oracle in Sep 2023. Yet, AFAIK there are no 3rd party reviews available nor is the Oracle A2 instance.
AMD stated they are ready to adopt ARM at any time it makes sense.
ZenX branding will surely stop at some point. I mean, the brand will be nearly 10 yo with Zen 6.
Intel has used Core branding even longer. Sometimes you don’t need to needlessly rename.
The Core branding may possibly drop from premium products at some point soon-ish in the future.
ARM or RISC-V doesn't inherently bring you power efficiency.
Apple cpus are superior simple because they are well designed and well made; ISA doesn't make that much of a lift.
I believe AMD will make arm cpus when customers demand it.
Given how modular ZEN architecture is, AMD could reuse most of the parts with minimal manpower and time.
Some don’t understand that x86 can be every bit as efficient as ARM (RISC-V already is).
Apple released a core on a cutting edge process that was performant and efficient. People suddenly think ARM is better. (it isn’t in terms of performance or compatibility) — Note that they haven’t been able to much improve on the design since launch.
Chip design is all about compromise. Apple built a mobile chip and scaled it up.
Intel and AMD long ago began designing a single core design centered around the desktop and server at a time when mobility was not as important (desktops used to be more popular than laptops, and smartphones did not exist, so this approach made sense. There has been no need to change (except mobile) and no desire to do it.
Atom began as a a bit of a redesign for mobile and scaled from there, but targeted density. Note (and this is serious IIRC material folks, I am getting too old to keep all this in my head) that when Atom first launched on mobile, it was FASTER than ARM chips that existed at the time, but had worse efficiency.
AMD/Intel have designs in the pipeline that make the M1 look like a toy, but CPU design takes time and you won’t really see the results until next year or maybe the year after. Note: power consumption will be a constant as long as chip designs scale that high.
Pretty sure AMD already has video encoders and decoders as good as anyone's, and they could probably license an ISP from someone like Google or Samsung. Apple was able to develop all that stuff internally with no trouble, but a modem has presented more of a problem.
AMD has the best gfx IP in the business. They just haven’t bothered licensing it out broadly or building their own SoC.
They can't get their Ryzen Mobile on the market and they'd want to attack smartphone market where timing and execution are are of first importance ?
I don't think so. Not yet at least.
What about margins in this market ? Going after Qualcomm isn't gonna be simple at all although competition would be nice of course.
If they get well established in the ARM PC (maybe tablet?) market, they might want to stretch it but I doubt it.
Then, maybe they wanna buy Mediatek, lol.
I think we will see a mobile SoC from AMD eventually. I spoke to folks (engineers and a marketing person at a couple unrelated conferences) at the company in the past and all expressed the desire. AMD actually uses ARM quite a bit even today, and they have some interesting stuff prototyped as well.
They can only execute so fast and the AI boom has definitely impacted that.
I don't understand Samsung. They keep announcing new processes that never appear in any designs anyone sees until ages later and then in small quantities, but have breathless press releases claiming process superiority all the time.
Now they are going to claim they are first to 2nm, but they can't even ship any first gen "3nm" stuff in quantity.
I guess this is to fool shareholders? Because the general public isn't a customer of Samsung foundry, and no one is going to buy an Android phone because it advertises "fabbed by Samsung". What's their game here, how does all this deception actually pay off for them?
They do have process superiority…in South Korea. 🤣
Samsung is like discount Intel. Somewhat worse performance for a significantly better price. That was why NVIDIA used them for so long. Margins > performance.
Why did NVIDIA switch? There were a number of factors. Here are some…the slide deck is probably incredible.
1) Samsung
anything is pretty far behind TSMC N4P at this point.
2) RDNA1 scared NVIDIA, so did the last iteration of Vega. They were worried that the gap from SS vs TSMC would become quite considerable and make it difficult to remain competitive.
3) They got a sweetheart deal from TSMC. They pay a low price compared to other customers (a few thousand per wafer less at one point, still significantly more than Samsung)
4) They had already used TSMC in the server space where margins weren’t as tight. It isn’t cost effective to have 2 different designs fabbed at 2 different places. Also: people were buying GeForce desktop or low cost workstation products instead of premium enterprise offerings.
5) Yields were a problem along with capacity. Samsung also reportedly increased pricing by as much as 40% for some line items between 2019 and 2023. In one noted case it was actually cheaper for one client to switch to TSMC!
Point number 4 is also why GPU prices went up so much. AI is a small part of it. NVIDIA really did not want mid-tier stuff eating their enterprise lunch so they drastically changed up their pricing structure. The 4090 could be sold for as little as $699 and still be decently profitable, for example, at least when i did the breakdown at launch.
Don’t count Samsung out yet, however. All major tech companies are in constant discussions with them:
AMD was said to be designing a new affordable APU and GPU for lower end (using Zen and Radeon IP)
EDIT: The APU in question would not
be part of the Ryzen family unless things changed (my info is old). The designs were to target the sub $500 market. Think PCIE 3.0 (fewer lanes as well), much smaller cache, fewer cores, and low clocks. It is my understanding that GloFo and Samsung were having a conversation and Intel has recently been talking to AMD as well.
Intel uses Samsung for chipsets.
Apple uses them.
Everyone that wants to design “affordable” AI chips are talking to Samsung. They can be up to 60% cheaper depending on the node, options, etc…or they were in late 2019.
Samsung’s biggest competitive threat currently is Intel. Intel is offering a significantly better process for less money.