Some while back, Wolfgang Grüner posted an interesting hypothesis about AMD’s future direction possibly including ARM designs, at Conceivably Tech (original article) and many others have chipped in saying this is either a terrible idea or a great idea.
So, could AMD be about to give up their crown jewels, x86, and jump ship to ARM to compete in the growing smartphone and tablet markets with dozens of other chipset manufacturers?
Well, AMD say no, but had previously been speaking in somewhat coded terms and have followed this up with several very vague comments about no doors being closed. With no permanent CEO in place, it seems unlikely that such a strategic decision could have been made in the past few months but why should (or shouldn’t) AMD consider bringing out an ARM chip in theory, if they haven’t decided this already behind closed doors?
We’ll have a look at if this is a sensible plan or whether they may be trying to buy some time: announcing new ARM products may well hurt their current product offerings and roadmap, yet delivering a whole new CPU architecture on a new instruction set takes a long time and, if they were to have only started recently, they would be some years away from hitting real products.
x86‘s past
In the past, AMD’s main strength has been its x86 licence which has allowed it to run Microsoft’s Windows and the vast library of applications available for that, letting them compete against Intel for the high ASPs, decent margins and good volumes offered in the PC world.
VIA, Cyrix, Rise, IBM, IDT, Transmeta and others who previously sold x86 processors have effectively fallen to the side leaving a virtual duopoly of Intel and AMD; even AMD looked to be on shaky ground until new investors from Saudi Arabia spun off their manufacturing division and Intel paid them $1.25 billion to settle a massive anti-trust legal case.
In recent years, ARM tried to break into the PC market, showing off tiny, low-cost netbook-competitors to little effect. Qualcomm invested large amounts in promoting their SmartBook concept and, again, failed. Why? No O/S. No apps: no Office, no IE, no iTunes, no Photoshop, no Firefox, no Flash.
It didn’t matter what chip you had inside your product: if you released something which looked like a notebook PC, people expected Windows. Linux was not ready for the unwashed masses, as Acer discovered with their first EeePC models, where the Linux ones were sent right back to the stores they were bought from.
But times have changed, with the iPad redefining what was needed from a computing device and with Microsoft announcing that future versions of Windows would run on ARM as well as x86 – the first open, dual-architecture consumer platform in the desktop Windows range. Even Apple are rumoured to be making a switch to ARM so maybe the time is right now?