The Wall Street Journal is reporting that AMD is taking a leap into unknown waters, as it readies its first ever ARM chip.
The new chip—codenamed 'Seattle' and previously hinted at—is apparently based on the architecture designed by ARM which is now prolific in smartphones and tablets. Interestingly though, according to the Wall Street Journal, the chips will be aimed at server systems—where the same power savings required by mobile applications are becoming increasingly attractive.
It won't be the first time a company has offered up an ARM chip for use in servers—Applied Micro Circuits has done something similar before with the X-Gene server-on-a-chip—but AMD does carry enough weight to make the scheme potentially successful. That's a fairly big "potentially": there are enough question marks here—does the world want ARM in servers, can AMD offer a decent ARM products, blah, blah, blah—that success is far from guaranteed.
The Journal claims the processors will come in several versions, first with eight processor cores and later with the option of 16, all ticking by at 2GHz or higher. The Journal expects AMD to officially announce the chip later today, though also suggests it won't be available until the first half of 2014. [WSJ]
Image by Eye of Wolf under Creative Commons license
DISCUSSION
There are a LOT of companies coming out with 64-bit ARM servers next year. AMD, AMCC, Samsung, Broadcom, Nvidia, Calxeda and others. Actually, AMCC claims to have a 64-bit low power server currently, but rumor has it the chip isn't functional.
The 64-bit linux versions for ARM aren't going to be released until second half of 2014, so that when it'll really take off.