Hot Factors of AMD on its new ARM-based chip in Market

Semiconductor giant AMD has revealed details on one of its first chips based on ARM's Risc architecture.

The chip, codenamed Hierofalcon, is a 64-bit system on a chip (SoC) based on ARM's Cortex A57 processor core and will be available from the middle of 2014.

The 28nm SoC will be available with four or eight cores and support 10 Gigabit Ethernet, error-correcting code memory and PCI Express 3.0. Power consumption will range from 15W to 30W TDP.

It will be targeted at network and storage infrastructure inside the datacente, a market Intel hopes to serve with its C2000 series of Atom SoCs. AMD will also release a separate ARM-based chip, codenamed Seattle, which is aimed at servers.

AMD also today announced new x86-based embedded SoCs to be released early next year. The Steppe Eagle SoC is based on two to four "enhanced" Jaguar cores and the Radeon HD 8000 series GPU, and is the next iteration of AMD's low-power G-series of APUs. Bald Eagle is based on two to four Steamroller cores and AMD Radeon HD 9000 series GPU, and is a continuation of AMD's high-performance R-series of APU/CPUs.

At the end of the year the company will also launch a new discrete GPU for embedded applications. The GPU, codenamed Adelaar, will be based on AMD's Graphics Core Next architecture, feature 2GB of GGDR5 memory and have 72GB/s memory throughput. It will be available as a PCIe add-on card, as a multi-chip module or mobile PCIe module.

AMD embedded roadmap. Image: AMD

Apparently you missed that the ARM chip AMD is talking about includes a 10GB NIC, memory controller, PCI-E 3.0 controller... all within that 15-30 W TDP. That's what "System on a Chip" means - just about everything you need is already there. Haswell may be 17-35 W TDP and a whole lot more oomph as a CPU, but you need to add a network interface, and memory controller, and PCI-E, and... And all of those suck power, consume physical space, cost money...

If your application can live with the reduced performance of ARM, the power and space savings are truly significant.