I see more opportunity for a coprocessor than a replacement chip. Maybe it’s the tinkerer in me but i would just like to some sort of secondary chipset to revive serial analog connections and interface with various new/legacy hardware. I hate that laptops are going to all usb all the time, I have to service too much old machinery that needs legacy connectors and if i had a configurable serial interface i could slap together a port monitor, read and format the data i need without the need of old legacy equipment..... idk it’s a bit of a pipe dream
Yeah, gonna say AMD probably isn't interested in making a chip to cater to your niche of a niche. I actually think there likely already exists ARM based stuff that does what you want (there's lots of Raspberry Pi and other "tinker" boards with tons of different uses and I could swear I've seen someone that made one just to easily interface with older serial interfaces for various reasons like you're apparently looking to do).
I also don't know why you don't like USB, it sounds like its making it so you wouldn't need such a thing?
K12 appears to be shelved. I don't think it is in AMD's interests to encourage ARM servers. Right now the server AMD64 CPU market is basically a duopoly, and AMD and Intel aren't giving out IP licenses to allow for new competitors- whereas ARM will happily sell a license to anyone with a big enough cheque book. Better for AMD to let the ARM market flounder and die, and keep a nice big chunk of a restricted market.
Yeah K12 is dead. If AMD were to go ARM it'd almost certainly be using standard ARM designs, possibly tweaked some. I think AMD would look to leverage their other IP (stuff like their GPU, InfinityFabric) more as their means of differentiating their ARM products. They'd also likely target server markets since there's not a lot of ARM competition and it would let them leverage more of their IP.
Which I've offered the question before, why wouldn't AMD buddy up with ARM to develop a new high performance ARM core (maybe for servers or something), where AMD could license IP like InfinityFabric and/or their GPU (which gives them a leg up on getting software built for their hardware). AMD gets to influence the core design (which means they'll know whats in it before any other licensee so they'll have a near perpetual leg up on the competition), gets IP licensing, while hedging their bets should there be any issues with x86 licensing.
ARM isn't floundering or dying. It never took off in the server space really if that's what you're talking about. But I think that absolutely could change. There's going to be a lot of change to that market in the next 5-10 years, and I feel like ARM is likely more adaptible to changes than x86 is, but AMD and Intel are making that possibly not true. I think that is an area where ARM's licensing model is actually somewhat limiting (by that I mean, that they develop a core and other aspects, then companies can license it and build from there, but there's an inherent delay in the development). x86 looks like it'll be doing very well (i.e dominate outside of mobile) for another 5 years. Past that though, we'll see. But by then I think x86 vs ARM will probably be even less of an issue/factor, so it might be entirely moot. But I think the issue will more be, how do those integrate into the overall system. It would be my guess that ARM will be more able to be adaptible into a new programming chain where maybe GPUs would be the dominate piece programmed for. Although maybe its about what can do the control core aspect the best (i.e. where its dictating data to and from specialized hardware), and I feel like x86 has an edge there (but don't know if that's true or not).
The new iPad OS is a very strong push towards Mac OS functionality, I would not be entirely surprised to find that it has even more in common with the Mac OS codebase than iOS does.
Especially considering it addresses a lot of the productivity functionality that was missing in iOS that would be necessary for migrating Mac apps to iOS/iPadOS and ARM.
Actually I'd guess its the other way around, that Apple made iPad OS because they're slowly making MacOS more like iOS, but they kinda need to split iOS into a higher performance version for higher end hardware, while they can keep tailoring regular iOS to phones and other devices. Although, one of the biggest announcements from the recent Apple dev conference is some method of translating iOS apps onto MacOS as I think they're looking to converge development, so it could be argued that they're more going the route you said.
Which, I wonder why they wouldn't just run iOS on Mac in a VM. And then maybe even in the future do the same with MacOS. Where they can maintain compatibility, and then use whichever one as they see fit. Maybe even do a third VM that is just the GUI so they can tailor that to individual products. But then I think we'll see things simplify by the time they'd get around to that (basically I think AR glasses will become the dominant base computing form factor, powered by cloud processing although initially it'll probably tether to phone/tablet/laptop/desktop as an intermediary until we get wireless networking that could link to the cloud platforms; but instead of having a phone display or tablet display or other monitor, most people will be using AR glasses, so UI will target that). From what I've gathered there's very little (almost no) performance penalty these days and the VM environments can have low enough level access to the hardware, but can also be isolated for security and stability.
This seems like one of those instances where Microsoft has a good idea (that's essentially what Microsoft has been doing on the Xbox One, which they've been moving Xbox and even Windows as more services), but because its Microsoft, Apple has to try and accomplish the same thing in a different way just because. Kinda like how they used to say the Surface line is bad and flawed by being a 2 in 1 and merging tablet and laptop, but then have been doing exactly that (and even started marketing the iPad Pro as a computer and not a tablet).
Wasn't K12 planned to have the same backend as their x86-64 cores? How then do you imagine it would end up much faster? Maybe smaller but Zen is already minuscule.
They developed a high performance x86-64 core around 4mm^2 with up to 64 in a single socket. I can see why they abandoned the ARM route. Instead they'll bring more cores to the x86-64 market. It seems like a good strategy when ARM servers are still a rounding error in the server market. Put another way: they could develop an ARM chip similar to Rome, but how much smaller would that market be?
Which that's the thing, arguably I think ARM would let AMD cram more cores into a die than x86 (which is why I think they were co-developing them, as they likely could see the writing on the wall that ARM would keep advancing, and ARM likely would let them stuff more cores in for the markets that they were targeting - servers/HPC/etc). Zen is a good design, but that means K12 likely would've been similarly good.
I think what balked AMD is that the consumer ARM space is crowded so they'd really struggle to make inroads there, the software wasn't mature for that (Windows being the key one and Android was still a mess so it wasn't going to be a viable alternative to Windows for computing devices). Plus at the time they were likely deciding this stuff, Apple had started to make their own ARM chips and had just started to make custom ones that were opening people's eyes about ARM's potential (so AMD wouldn't be able to court Apple with ARM cores). Point being, I think there were a lot of reasons why AMD decided to focus on x86, and I think it was a smart move for the time.
But I think ARM has potential, and I think its has more potential now than it did before. Much of what made Zen good could be applied to ARM (InfinityFabric, I/O die, CPU die modules, etc). So I wouldn't rule out AMD looking at ARM in the future. They don't need to now and for the forseeable future, and x86 hasn't been a hindrance yet (and possibly won't, weirdly it seems like a lot of people think that ARM is going to be eclipsed by MIPS or something, which I'm just not seeing at all). But I feel like we'll see ARM show some benefits that could help it start to win out versus x86. Most if not all of the things advancing x86 processors these days can be utilized almost directly in ARM. I think the next test will be which one can transition to this next level of memory/storage tiers, and unified addressing, as that's what will fuel performance the most. Dropping overall system data latency is the next big computing performance step. Its Intel's focus (I think its why they're looking for GPUs, as they can integrated their own interconnects and work to minimize latency for large datasets best; of course they use the GPU for processing the datasets so they can make money from it, but by unifying aspects of the overall platform, much in the same way that AMD is looking at doing, means they can offer a jump in the overall performance CPU advancement or GPU advancement alone couldn't achieve; and likewise they can't get that from trying to work with other companies where driver software and the like comes into play - that can be mitigated with highly tailor software for supercomputers but for the more general HPC/enterprise markets it doesn't).
One area that I think has potential in the HPC space is, I've wondered if we might even see ARM be able to realize the idea behind Intel's Larrabee. Granted GPUs have since offered most of that by becoming much more programmeable, but the thought behind it was that cramming in as many programmable cores in as possible. Intel couldn't realize that and only kinda half-hearted tried at it (I think they talked about like 512 core versions, but we only got like 7x something core chips - which even with 4 way multi-threading only offered 2xx threads). Even that was good for some markets. ARM I think could cram in a lot more, or I think it can be integrated into other processors (think how AMD was looking to merge CPU and GPU).
Two last things to note. Most of these new processes seem built with ARM designs more in mind so they seem to favor ARM designs somewhat inherently. The other thing to note is that Nvidia, almost out of necessity is planning on pushing ARM more, since AMD and Intel both now have reasons to prioritize their own stuff. I think Nvidia saw that coming and why they started on Tegra (since that happened around the time that Intel showed substantially more interest in GPU with the iGPU advancement in Sandy Bridge, and AMD had been talking about that for years), especially the custom cores. But they're talking about integrating ARM into their GPUs for even HPC markets. Which maybe they'd integrate an ARM core into their base GPU SM block, so however many SMs a chip has it'd have that many ARM cores. I'd guess it'd be more like a block of them with 1/2 to 1/4 CPU core to SM core count.
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