I stated the reasons why I don't think going to ARM is as much of a major undertaking as you think, but these reasons were ignored. Instead the reply is maybe they'll dump Bulldozer.
So, I'll let future tell the story.
Btw, aren't they supporting multiple archs now (gpus don't design themselves), with its own tools, language and dev environment (OpenCl. So adding another they arch they don't have to design from the ground up makes things much easier especially when a lot of these tools are already available.
Honestly, if they go with ARM, I think they'll design a SOC with a mobile gpu core. It won't require a highly customized core like snapdragon and certainly if the premise, which I hear often, is that "any old chinese company can do this", then it would seem reasonable that AMD can do it even better.
Besides, GF needs to fill its lines to dilute fixed costs and having a cheap, tiny, fairly simple chip to fab would certainly do it. The integration with the core and a powerful mobile gpu would make it unique. Look at the fusion model today. The cores aren't that powerful but they do the job, however the are coupled with a very powerful gpu that is unmatched and manage to do it a low power. AMD is betting that graphics will overcome cpu core limitations and integrating a generic ARM core with a powerful mobile gpu fits the paradigm.
We'll see soon enough. |
