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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

After over a year of delays, AMD has launched its 64-bit ARM server chips [nextplatform.com], the A1120, A1150, and A1170:

AMD has some stiff competition in the ARM chip arena now that Applied Micro has its X-Gene 1 out and X-Gene 2 chips ramping [nextplatform.com] and Cavium is also shipping its first-generation ThunderX processors [nextplatform.com], both of which bring much more computing to bear than AMD's Seattle. Few of the ARM server chip makers believe they can take on Intel's hegemony in the datacenter with the Xeon processors head on with their first products, and they are being very careful to target their initial ARM processors at very specific workloads on the periphery of the core compute complexes at most organizations where the Intel Xeon prevails.

This is not a bad strategy, of course. This is precisely how Intel toppled proprietary minicomputers and mainframes and RISC/Unix platforms in the datacenter with the Xeons, starting from the PC and working its way up from file servers to core machines running mission critical applications. As The Next Platform has pointed out time and again, the attack usually comes from below when the processing technology changes in the platform, and in this case, the ARM upstarts are taking the chips preferred by smartphones and tablets and beefing it up to take on server jobs. The idea, according to ARM Holdings, the licensee of the ARM architecture, is to provide an increasingly broad and deep chip lineup across multiple vendors and by 2020 to take at least 25 percent of the server shipments in the world [nextplatform.com]. It is an ambitious plan, and one that has had its bar raised from 20 percent only a year ago.

[...] AMD has been a part of this plan for several years now, and with the delivery of the Opteron A1100, it hopes to get a little revenue return on its development investment and set the stage for the future "K12" ARM server chips expected in 2017. Daniel Bounds, who took over as senior director of datacenter solutions at AMD last October, did not mention the K12 effort as part of the prebriefings concerning the Seattle chip. But with the Opteron A1100 launch, all eyes will turn to the future even as AMD tries to keep its partners and potential customers rooted in the present, which is still early days for the ARM assault on the datacenter.

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In the time between when AMD first announced details of "Seattle" and today, Intel launched Xeon D [anandtech.com], a 14nm Xeon E5-based system-on-a-chip intended to compete against fledgling ARM server chips at the low end of the server market. The A1100 SoCs are also built on a dated 28nm process, while AMD's 2016 "Zen" chips for PCs and 2017 "K12" ARM server chips will be built on a 14/16nm process. But perhaps the delays aren't so bad after all [pcworld.com]:

AMD was supposed to ship Seattle last year, but ultimately the delay worked to its benefit because the ARM server market wasn't ready, said Dan Bounds, senior director of data center products and enterprise solutions at AMD. There's more awareness of the benefits of ARM servers today, and more software is available, but AMD knows it has a lot of work to do going forward, Bounds said. A lack of software has hurt the adoption of ARM servers, but as Seattle comes to market there will be Linux-based operating systems, middleware, and KVM and Xen hypervisors available to run on them.

Peformance of the flagship A1170 is reportedly around 80-90% of Intel's 8-core Atom C2750 [anandtech.com]. The A1170 also has a 60% higher TDP and 400 MHz lower clock rate than the C2750. The A1170 will cost around $150, with around the same price and performance as Intel's Atom C2730, a chip with an even lower TDP.

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