A New AMD Licensing Deal Could Create More x86 Rivals For Intel (pcworld.com) 110
angry tapir quotes a report from PCWorld: AMD has announced a plan to license the design of its top-of-the-line server processor to a newly formed Chinese company, creating a brand-new rival for Intel. AMD is licensing its x86 processor and system-on-chip technology to a company called THATIC (Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Co. Ltd.), a joint venture between AMD and a consortium of public and private Chinese companies. AMD is providing all the technology needed for THATIC to make a server chip, including the CPUs, interconnects and controllers. THATIC will be able to make variants of the x86 chips for different types of servers. AMD is much smaller than Intel, and licensing offers it an easy way to expand the installed base of AMD technology. The resource-strapped company will also generate licensing revenue in the process, said Jim McGregor, principal analyst at Tirias Research.
Poetic (Score:2)
... that AMD would be licensing Zen to a company in the country where Zen (buddhism) was founded.
Re: (Score:2)
...in the country where Zen...
No, that would be Japan.
...(buddhism)...
No, that would be India.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Theft (Score:1)
The resource-strapped company will also generate licensing revenue in the process... until it suddenly doesn't.
Re: (Score:3)
Yeah, AMD's leadership seems to be too stupid these days to learn anything from Qualcomm's plight...
Re: Theft (Score:3, Insightful)
... or any of a hundred other companies. It's funny how after three years the Chinese company dissolves the joint venture, yet continues to make the same product. From chips, to cars (ask Chevrolet), to "Mig" Fighter Jets, I'm not sure I've ever heard of one of these JVs that actually worked out for the non-Chinese party. At this point, even though I don't like victim blaming, you deserve to get hosed when you supply the intellectual property into one of these deals.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Theft (Score:2)
Or rather let the more competent companies like Qualcomm make money for them.
Oddly though, anyone remember PowerPC and RISC from two decades ago? IBM let Motorola and others make chips and it left IBM to die on the micro computer market outside of the Nintendo WII
Re: (Score:2)
They ran into technical problems that prevented them from matching pace with Intel and when Apple made the switch, what incentive did they have to continue down that road?
LK
Re: (Score:3)
It was less technical reasons and more that they were arguing with IBM over chip pricing/manufacturing quantities and Intel swooped in and made them an offer they couldn't refuse.
Re: (Score:2)
It was less technical reasons and more that they were arguing with IBM over chip pricing/manufacturing quantities and Intel swooped in and made them an offer they couldn't refuse.
Steve Jobs did not want Apple to be held under pressure or hostage by anyone neither Microsoft nor IBM/Motorola. Apple for years had an x86 version of MacOS classic and naturally MacOSX as NextStep was native to both platforms from the gecko.
Also Intel had better manufactoring which is how they are beating AMD as with lower NM sized chips and Intel made LWISC computers and risc inside later pentiums. Basically the x86 instructions get converted to RISC internally in a wrapper. So Intel could offer the same
Re: (Score:3)
The PowerPC\Power ISA merged when the POWER4 was released in 2001, so the intent was always for the PowerPC variant to die off at that point. If Apple continued down the PowerPC route instead of the switch to x86/x64 they'd likely be using one the POWER chips instead of a custom PowerPC.
The resulting POWER ISA is still going strong and IBM currently licenses the design to a number of different companies including Tundra Semiconductor, HCL Enterprise, Culturecom, P.A. Semi, Sony, Honeywell, Toshiba and Cr
Re: (Score:2)
IBM did not bother creating a mobile chipset for the G5, which by the way was a cut down POWER4 variant and thus already some "big iron" hardware for the desktops. It could have gone on including in laptops, but such stuff costs billions and Unix workstations were dead, OS/2 and NT on PPC were dead. Meanwhile x86 are lowish power / high peformance and used on most laptops, desktops, servers not just mac pro and imac. :)
Also IBM went to making 5GHz speed demons
They'd have had to throw out that line of work,
Re: (Score:2)
Business as usual (Score:2)
Speculation on the possibility of deminishing returns in future cannot and should not drive this policy decision decision.
Anyone who doesn't wholeheartedly applaud this decision on any but financial grounds (has AMD obtained a a good price for its licenses ?) has left the Path of True Capitalism. Be told.
Aren't these munitions? (Score:3)
Historically top of the line desktop processor tech is considered munitions and not exportable to places like China. What changed?
Re: Aren't these munitions? (Score:2, Insightful)
They probably contributed to Hillary's campaign fund.
Re: (Score:1)
Historically top of the line desktop processor tech is considered munitions and not exportable to places like China. What changed?
It's an AMD processor.
Re: Aren't these munitions? (Score:2)
Re: Aren't these munitions? (Score:5, Interesting)
Slashdot now thinks that Intel is a cpu design company that also happens to make semiconductors, rather than a semiconductor company that also happens to design cpu's.
Intels process was about 2 years ahead of everybody, but they couldn't keep it up.. the tick tock is over with and they are now laying off because they see the writing on the wall, which is that their process lead ends this year with almost no hope of getting it back and maybe they will even fall behind now.
GloFlo and Toshiba have reached parity, and TSMC will be the new leader when their Fab 15 starts running off 10nm chips before Intel can.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Historically top of the line desktop processor tech is considered munitions and not exportable to places like China. What changed?
US government living in the past?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... [theregister.co.uk]
"US govt bans Intel from selling chips to China's supercomputer boffins
Xeon, Xeon Phi processors slapped on trade block list"
Like: "AMD chips? Hah! Nah they can have those! It's not like they are competitive enough anyway!" - "What could possibly go wrong?!"
Re: Yeah but... (Score:3, Funny)
Intel chips are obsolete.. AMD's fused cpu/gpu architecture with hbm/hbm2, HSA, asynch shaders new generation gpu's, etc..etc..etc.. is going to bleed Intel big time..
Intel was able to put a lot of money to make its chips fast.. but for a high price.. which morons always payed the huge profit slice.. Now AMD can make faster chips for a fraction of the price.. now that AMD has 14 nm, 16 nm, and son 7nm chip foundry technology..
I bought at $1.78, and I will retire in 5 years with the profit I already starte
Re: (Score:1)
Holy crap an AMD stockpump on slashdot?
Re: Yeah but... (Score:5, Interesting)
I have been hearing this since Bulldozer. AMD consistently over-promises and under-delivers. Until AMD actually ships this stuff, its vapor and not much more. I would like to see AMD succeed, but they actually have to get a compelling product out the door first.
"Intel is just a cpu company'
,br> And SSDs, NICs, wireless solutions, chipsets. They also make barebone PCs called NUCs.
Re: (Score:2)
I did build a AMD AM1 platform system in the Antec ISK 110 case, but it definitely cost significantly more than the NUC. Also the NUC has a built i
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If something is broken on a lot of chips when they are made, you gotta figure out how to sell them anyways.
Re: (Score:2)
Something broken like ECC support?
No, their market segmentation is very deliberate and shrewd and has been so since the 875P chipset which was the last or close to the last non-Xeon design to support ECC.
Re: Yeah but... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Intel has admitted that it wont have 10nm up and running until next year (2017). and has denied speculation that it wont be until late next year at the earliest. They managed to turn their 2 year lead into at best 6 months behind, and they can
Re: (Score:2)
And because AMD is fabless, they might be able to score some time at TSMC's 10nm fab when it opens this year (2016.) Intel will not be able to (unless both TSMC and Intel disregard unofficial industry rules, something Intel would want but TSMC would view as suicide.)
Intel has admitted that it wont have 10nm up and running until next year (2017). and has denied speculation that it wont be until late next year at the earliest. They managed to turn their 2 year lead into at best 6 months behind, and they cant even keep their current fabs running 24/7 these days (leading to 11% layoffs) because GloFlo and TSMC are killing them on everything but desktop cpu's.
Intel is suddenly not in a good position. They better pull a rabbit out of their research divisions ass.
That is the problem AMD did not expect. You are Qualcomm or global foundaries. AMD asks you to make 5 million chips for a cheap profit margin as competition from INtel is so fierce and winning on price for OEM's on their cheapest lines is the only win. Then Apple and Samsung knock on your door and ask to make 50 million chips and will PAY YOU MORE. Hmm which would you chose for your lines?
The answer is to tell AMD to shove it you care only about mobile product lines and until you pay me more and give me mor
Re: (Score:2)
Then Apple and Samsung knock on your door and ask to make 50 million chips and will PAY YOU MORE.
Amazing how you are bewildered by economics. A better product of course demands a higher price. Your bewilderment is evident in that you think only TSMC can demand a higher price, when in reality anyone paying TSMC that higher price can also demand a higher price on the other end.
You guys are such uneducated simpletons.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of people prefer PCs. Its user base is not shrinking.l the problem is people are replacing PCs far less often than they used to. This creates the illusion that its shrinking. Its not. But its enough of a problem to create a hit on the bottom line of the CPU companies.
Re: (Score:2)
Intel gave up on desktops. They started the death spiral. Laptops won't get faster, just GPU bumps.
Look at numbers for Haswell vs anything since. It's not much. Microsoft's windows 10 move further hurt them because people can sit on PCs longer. Microsoft had to save themselves.
Intel needs to blow out performance on PCs to get upgrades started again and for that to matter, we need a new killer app for PCs that require real CPU power. Something that can't be done on a tablet right now. Something that is
Dying business (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Youre kidding. Its a huge server platform. Intel did drop the ball on mobile and should have been out on the market early on that one. But, somehow, they let it get away from them.
Re: (Score:2)
Intel did drop the ball on mobile and should have been out on the market early on that one. But, somehow, they let it get away from them.
They forgot who they were competing with. ARM and AMD arent their competition. TSMC, GloFlo, Toshiba, etc are their competition.
All of these companies will have equal (2) or better (1) fabs this year.
(2) GloFlo and Toshiba are already running off 14nm chips.
(1) TSMC opens up a 10nm fab this year.
Re: (Score:1)
Aren't you the clever one, intentionally misinterpreting the "x86" shorthand reference to Intel-derived processors to mean only the 32-bit incarnations of that same architecture rather than the contextually-obvious reference to the entire sprawling Intel x86 & AMD64 family, as opposed to, say,
Re: (Score:1)
x86 does not mean 32 bit. 64 bit procs are still x86 architecture.
Re: (Score:2)
embedded - Arduino 101 is powered by an Intel Quark.
They mean the 64-bit technology. (Score:3)
Often x86 is used to mean any processor with an ISA descended from the original 8086, including modern 64-bit CPUs. So they mean AMD is licensing their x86-64 (or x64 or AMD64, whichever way you like to put it) technology which is not as powerful as Intel's, but is still fully current in terms of ISA. They specifically mention AMD's "Zen" processor which is the new 64-bit architecture expected to release this year.
Re: (Score:2)
So they mean AMD is licensing their x86-64 (or x64 or AMD64, whichever way you like to put it) technology which is not as powerful as Intel's, but is still fully current in terms of ISA.
Not sure where you're getting the idea that AMD's instruction set would be "not as powerful" considering they licensed their x86-64 tech to Intel in the first place.
Re: (Score:2)
Their tech is not as powerful, the actual chip. They aren't just licensing the ISA, they are licensing the chip design.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Dying business (Score:2)
but isn't x86 more or less obsolete?
Pretty much, which is why Apple's giving up on x86 and transitioning to the PowerPC architecture.
End of Days (Score:1)
Giving away the secret sauce for few hundred million to a quasi state Chinese venture who will eventually rob you blind seems like a desperate gasp of a long has been trying to stay afloat.
wave goodbye to AMD (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
+ Intel graphics license. ..)
+ New power-efficient same process as Nvidia chip (same process before too but
+ Depending on how you view it almost as small process as Intel for processors + hopefully a better price / performance at at least as good performance as the regular desktop range of Intel chips.
(+ all the GameWorks hate online? + Pretty nice and competitive "open-source" Linux drivers.)
Re: (Score:2)
AMD has had a console monopoly for the past three or so years anyway (their chips power the current versions of the Wii, Xbox and Playstation), and I haven't exactly seen an uptick of games being optimised on the PC for AMD graphics hardware...
So if AMD have had a full monopoly in the console arena for the past 3 years or so, and had most of the console arena for the previous generation as well (Xbox 360 and Wii - PS3 had an Nvidia chip), why are they still struggling today, when apparently the console mono
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There is a fair improvement on DirectX 12 games, alas tied to that Windows 10 crap but the story might be similar with Vulkan. Also perhaps works with some recent DX11 games and/or drivers.
AMD GCN since the now old 7970 / 280X has had some good support for async computing which used to be just wasted silicon. Now they're partly catching up the nvidia GPUs, although still fairly more power hungry. Right now you could get a Radeon Nano (not too power hungry) with a 1080p 144Hz screen and that'd be about the b
Re: (Score:2)
AMD is dying anyway at least as far as x86 whether they help the Chinese or not. I thought their bid for heterogeneous processing would save them but apparently there is not enough market demand for such a thing.
The timing of this seems bad (Score:4, Insightful)
With Intel laying people off and vowing to concentrate on the server market, wouldn't AMD be better off going after what's left of the desktop market? It's shrinking to be sure, but I think there's still a lot of meat on those bones, especially now that Intel won't be vying so hard for market share in that space. It would probably be a safer bet than handing over their IP to the Chinese.
Re: (Score:1)
They were running out of money fast, so they really had no choice. AMD has been losing money every quarter for the last year and that doesn't look to change until Polaris and Zen are released. Also, Intel is as strong as ever in "what's left of the desktop market". Even when Zen reaches the market it'll be competive, but still slower than Intel's offering.
Re: (Score:2)
They were running out of money fast, so they really had no choice. AMD has been losing money every quarter for the last year and that doesn't look to change until Polaris and Zen are released. Also, Intel is as strong as ever in "what's left of the desktop market". Even when Zen reaches the market it'll be competive, but still slower than Intel's offering.
Good to know. Why was this downmodded?
Re: (Score:2)
I don't see AMD eating into the Chinese MIPS market (though I'd love to see more MIPS devices Stateside).
Hmm (Score:2)
"front door attack" (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
My tablet has an Intel Atom in it. I hardly use it though.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Is the x86 platform.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel has an x86 smartphone CPU. x86 is a huge server platform. PCs are not going anywhere, people are just replacing their PCs every 7 rather than 3 years. This creates the illusion that the PC market is shrinking. its not. Smartphones are hellish when you want to do any real work. Not many want to do their taxes on a smartphone.
Re: (Score:1)