I agree partly. But instead beating Intel by 10% better efficiency in x86 yard AMD would be able to smash Intel with 2x as good efficiency with K12. Such a huge advantage could bring much more customers than just x86 ISA legacy (and this will become even stronger in time). But who knows, maybe Zen3 will bring double IPC with double efficiency and x86 will enter smart phone market
Yeah now AMD will make some cash and can afford to look into a k12 successor without risking the company. What AMD has shown in the last 1-2 decades is that it is too small of a company to influence the market. Intel and NV betting on "current" tech always won. First real quad-core? Didn't help AMD that much. The whole bulldozer fiasco. The uArch and idea behind it sounded reasonable on paper but it doesn't work unless you can provide the whole ecosystem to go with it. GCN with hardware scheduler and compute features? Didn't help. AMD was too early with that. Actually AMD was also first to tesselation. But then no one used it and later they gimped on it.
AMD is too financially constraint and too small to be a leader into a new "era".
And then performance, performance/watt and performance/$ isn't everything. Else intel should be going to 0% server market share in the next couple months. Because the will loose out on all of these already to Rome let alone Milan. You know what matters to corporation? Policy. And if policy is to buy server type X from OEM Y, then that is what you get. Because you can get mass rebate and have to train your people on 1 server. In fact since you can train them you can use "monkeys" to operate them instead of more expensive knowledgeable people that cost a lot more than power use.
(I'm currently fighting to get an AMD based server for my needs with corporate IT, I think I will get there but means dealying the whole thing for months...)
And then there also is the software. You know also what is policy in many corporate envs? Yes. Windows Server. Same reason. Monekys can work better with a GUI they already know than a cli. Yeah Amazon and co. buy a huge amount of server but so do all other big corps around the world combined. Much more. It's all the obscure intranet stuff no one outside actually knows about. Often this stuff is very old, internal legacy things. (when we moved from winxp to win7, everyone was moved to win7 32-bit due to 16-bit legacy apps). Only 1 year ago was I able to move to 64-bit win10. the big corporate world in non-tech is weird in that way and upgrading all your server stuff to work on ARM? Not going to happen. These people don't take risks. Why should they? Working with high power use is better than not working or delaying for months.
They can afford to develop ARM CPUs/SoCs internally to avoid vendor lock-in from other companies,
Exactly. K12 wouldn't have changed anything about this. It would still be vendor lock in. Amazon didn't create an ARM cpu because ARM is so cool. They did because they can't make an x86 one due to licensing. It's that simple.