The problem is that there will be a market for ARM servers for the simple reason that power and core density is becoming a bigger and bigger part of total hosting cost and ARM does low power well. AMD would be ignoring that at their peril. They're much more vulnerable to this than Intel since they're currently not generally the preferred high-end choice for most people.
Is ARM still lower power when dialed up to perform?
I think there are some interesting possibilities, especially with the bursty nature of web traffic but there is also still a noticeable performance gap between ARM and x86.
AMD has some strong folks in low power design, something that Intel hasn't done well in the datacenter. Many companies bought lower-power Opteron parts for disk-bound or generally lower-performance-need applications, and saved a fair amount of money over time.
Also, AMD is still working on leveraging its strengths from ATI, which might be useful depending on their market targeting.
Those are their strengths compared to Intel, not compared to the other ARM manufacturers. Intel keeps beating AMD, but part of the reason is that Intel's process is really good. The fact that they reach a given process node much faster than everyone else is important, but even for a given node Intel's, e.g., drive currents tend to be much better than anybody else's. Against the rest of the ARM world AMD won't have that humongous handicap, and I expect that they'll be able to compete much better at things like straight up performance.
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I don't see why AMD can do ARM better? AMDs strengths compared to Intel are in its APU and the number of cores they can cram on an x86.
I think they confused the market, severs, with the technology they actually have - x86.
Their biggest asset is the existing infrastructure and people to build x86 - there are 2 companies that can do this: Intel and AMD.
The problem is that there will be a market for ARM servers for the simple reason that power and core density is becoming a bigger and bigger part of total hosting cost and ARM does low power well. AMD would be ignoring that at their peril. They're much more vulnerable to this than Intel since they're currently not generally the preferred high-end choice for most people.
Is ARM still lower power when dialed up to perform?
I think there are some interesting possibilities, especially with the bursty nature of web traffic but there is also still a noticeable performance gap between ARM and x86.
AMD has some strong folks in low power design, something that Intel hasn't done well in the datacenter. Many companies bought lower-power Opteron parts for disk-bound or generally lower-performance-need applications, and saved a fair amount of money over time.
Also, AMD is still working on leveraging its strengths from ATI, which might be useful depending on their market targeting.
Those are their strengths compared to Intel, not compared to the other ARM manufacturers. Intel keeps beating AMD, but part of the reason is that Intel's process is really good. The fact that they reach a given process node much faster than everyone else is important, but even for a given node Intel's, e.g., drive currents tend to be much better than anybody else's. Against the rest of the ARM world AMD won't have that humongous handicap, and I expect that they'll be able to compete much better at things like straight up performance.