There's Still No Sign Of AMD's Low-Cost ARM Development Boards

[phoronix]

Phoronix: There's Still No Sign Of AMD's Low-Cost ARM Development Boards

For more than the past year I've been very much looking forward to AMD's Opteron ARM-based development boards. Sadly, these boards -- namely the HuskyBoard and LeMaker Cello -- are silently absent...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...-Or-HuskyBoard

[wizard69]

Sadly I think AMD has gone stupid with respect to ARM based hardware. I really see ARM based hardware as the way forward for modern computing systems. The fact that ARM is going after the super computing market ought to highlight the potential in the hardware. Combine that with the problems Intel and AMD have with hardware bloat in their chips ought to have shown AMD the path to the future.

[starshipeleven]

Sadly I think AMD has gone stupid with respect to ARM based hardware. I really see ARM based hardware as the way forward for modern computing systems. The fact that ARM is going after the super computing market ought to highlight the potential in the hardware. Combine that with the problems Intel and AMD have with hardware bloat in their chips ought to have shown AMD the path to the future.

While that is true it is also long term, AMD is much more likely to sell more x86 processors than ARM SoCs in the near term, and if they don't sell anything in the near term there will be no long term at all.

[andreano]

Thanks for the writeup, I'm wondering the same.

This guy is partly blaming 96board's weird form factors, calling the consumer edition "stripped", and enterprise edition "ridiculous":
https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/20...ktop-hardware/

I also suppose that RPi3 killed the AArch64 competition. People are starting to realize that hardware ain't better than the software support…

[starshipeleven]

I also suppose that RPi3 killed the AArch64 competition. People are starting to realize that hardware ain't better than the software support…

No, raspi3 is shit because it was designed to be a GPU with a CPU strapped on to do some minor things, and has only a USB port for device connectivity.

What is killing ARM64 is as usual the OEMs being a bunch of kiddies.
Without a nazi leader (MS) to whip them into making something that makes some kind of sense and follows some kind of standards they can only come up with the same shitty custom hardware in a pathetic attempt to vendor-lock someone.

Meanwhile the only ones with some vision (some small OEMs) can't realistically justify the risk of buying a batch of high-end ARM like say some stuff from Marvell, because there are no open specs for them, so they could only make a crappy embedded device.

The only one that has some chance of pulling this off is AMD, afaik they have designed the Zen sockets to be able to accept both x86 and ARM processors, so OEM don't need to think, they make the same boards and they will work also on ARM (hopefully, I really hope the UEFI runs on the security cores or whatever that does not involve an arch difference between the two processors or we are screwed).

[bountykiller]

I recently saw news were AMD said that ARM board wasn't a priority anymore. Basically the thing is that they are focusing on the x86 market because the ARM market wasn't growing as fast as expected and sadly they don't have enough ressources to develop both architectures.

[chuckula]

Sadly I think AMD has gone stupid with respect to ARM based hardware.

Really? I think AMD is trying to succeed with Zen. They might fall short, but Zen looks way way more exciting than literally every pipe-dream ARM server product that's ever gone past the powerpoint stage.

I really see ARM based hardware as the way forward for modern computing systems.

ARM is fine for a phone not because it is magically better but because of its intellectual property licensing models that make it easier for OEMs to integrate with wireless hardware. Everything else, including game consoles and even low-cost Google Chrome notebooks with excellent power efficiency? You want x86.

The fact that ARM is going after the super computing market ought to highlight the potential in the hardware. Combine that with the problems Intel and AMD have with hardware bloat in their chips ought to have shown AMD the path to the future.

Yeah, ARM is going after the supercomputing market. Everybody else is already there. That's called "catchup" and we have a graveyard of companies that couldn't even compete with Intel in the low-power microserver market where ARM is supposed to be magically good*, much less in HPC where Intel is selling Knight's Landing systems today instead of talking about an instruction set that doesn't even have a hardware prototype.

*ARM really isn't that special when a 65 watt Xeon-D with 16 cores is practically unbeatable in a energy efficiency metric at this point.

[chuckula]

Instead of a board that's recycling old ARM cores and that apparently isn't on sale anyway, may I suggest an alternative that's truly an SoC with strong power efficiency: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10574/...f-atom-iot-kit

Bonus points for having a GPU architecture with open-source in-kernel drivers and being made by Intel, who is the #1 organizational contributor to the Linux kernel.

[EmbraceUnity]

"AMD pulls back on its ARM server efforts as it refocuses its server strategy around x86-based Zen chips" August 11th, 2016 http://www.pcworld.com/article/31068...rades-arm.html

[chuckula]

"AMD pulls back on its ARM server efforts as it refocuses its server strategy around x86-based Zen chips" August 11th, 2016 http://www.pcworld.com/article/31068...rades-arm.html

I don't necessarily appreciate AMD's marketing antics but they were very smart to focus on making a good x86 server processor instead of trying to make a bad x86 server processor and a bad ARM server processor.