AMD analyzes future products toward ARM chip ready to go

Memory chip

Low-power servers have been a hot topic in recent years, especially as cloud computing trends have intensified, and energy-efficient, low-cost mass server deployments have been favored.

Because of its obvious advantages in power consumption, ARM chips, which have been used in the field of mobile terminals, are also beginning to enter the desktop and data center fields. In 2014, 64-bit ARM will be launched soon, and major processor manufacturers have laid out the development of 64-bit ARM processor products to seize this new type of land.

On September 10th, at the "ARM is In" ARM server technology seminar held in Beijing, Suresh Gopalakrishnan, AMD's global vice president and general manager of the server business unit, shared AMD's latest insights and future strategies for low-power servers. AMD's future product and strategy development was interviewed by ZDNet reporters.

Future product design trend

Among the top 10 cloud providers in the world, 7 are already using AMD's processors, and the future demand for users is lower power consumption, less space, and more computing resources, Suresh said. It is also the direction of AMD's launch of new products.

For the design of AMD's future products, Suresh introduced that there will be two ways to cooperate with users and OEM partners first, but at the same time Suresh emphasizes that this method can't achieve very good differentiation. Therefore, the other way is AMD. I hope to carry out some custom development on the chip, and cooperate with ODM to integrate intellectual property into the product.

In addition, AMD will also satisfy users based on new requirements from users, and also have the ability to customize products for large users.

64-bit ARM processor "Seattle" is ready to go

Under the trend of mobile social, social media image uploading and application development is very fast. These applications require a large amount of storage space, which requires very fast processing, and the computing speed needs to reach the second speed. If the response time is too long, the user experience is not good. For such applications, it often requires a lot of CPU and storage space, suitable for ARM processors.

AMD's friends know that AMD already has two major product lines, x86 and APU, and now AMD is actively expanding its third product line, which is the ARM processor.

At present, ARM processor is still at 32-bit. According to Suresh, AMD's first 64-bit low-power ARM architecture chip will be officially launched in 2014, code-named "Seattle." "AMD will be the fastest chip supplier to introduce 64-bit ARM processors," Suresh said.

As a result, AMD will offer a comprehensive range of silicon products to address the architectural mix required for different workloads.

Working with HP Moonshot is just the beginning

Hewlett-Packard has been active in promoting low-power servers, although the current low-power Moonshot system is based only on Intel Atom processors, but Suresh said that AMD and HP's R&D cooperation on low-power servers has been ongoing. .

Suresh introduced a computing node of the Moonshot system. AMD and HP jointly developed a compute node based on the APU slot, which can support up to 4 APUs.

In addition, in addition to strengthening ARM server development with a wide range of partners, AMD also hopes to put different instruction sets on the same chip to achieve good collaboration and realize heterogeneous computing environment.

Looking ahead, Suresh said that the micro-server ecosystem will take time to develop, and he expects the market share of micro-servers to reach 15% in 2015.

"China's server market is developing very fast. This is inseparable from the current cloud computing development. It includes not only the Internet, but also the financial industry. The demand for servers is very large. AMD will cooperate with local OEMs and financial and telecom operators to develop themselves. Advantages and characteristics," Suresh said.