After Years Of Waiting, Hands On With The AMD ARM Board

[phoronix]

Phoronix: After Years Of Waiting, Hands On With The AMD ARM Board

With Zen CPUs turning out very well in the marketplace, AMD appears to have divested some of their interest in ARM-based processors at least for the time being. But after waiting for years, I finally have my hands on an AMD Opteron A1100 ARM-based SBC for testing...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-ARM-In-My-Hands

[chuckula]

So it's really not clear what the future holds for the AMD A100 and future AMD ARM CPUs, but anyhow, our curiosity over this SoC can finally be answered with now being able to run some real Linux benchmarks on it.

Actually it's quite clear: AMD has abandoned ARM. It could be fun to see what the board does in a review article but these things are basically white elephants that will never go anywhere.

[mulenmar]

Actually it's quite clear: AMD has abandoned ARM. It could be fun to see what the board does in a review article but these things are basically white elephants that will never go anywhere.

Well, TECHNICALLY they didn't abandon ARM, they just assimilated it for their PSP. :P

[starshipeleven]

Actually it's quite clear: AMD has abandoned ARM. It could be fun to see what the board does in a review article but these things are basically white elephants that will never go anywhere.

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This intel fanboi is scared.

Really, for now AMD is just focusing on getting out of the sandpit which means good x86 parts, and will likely stay at it for at least another year.
It's still too soon to state so vehemently that they have abandoned ARM for good.

[chuckula]

^
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This intel fanboi is scared.

Really, for now AMD is just focusing on getting out of the sandpit which means good x86 parts, and will likely stay at it for at least another year.
It's still too soon to state so vehemently that they have abandoned ARM for good.

Scared of what exactly? A board that was obsolete the day that AMD demoed it in 2014 and that is still almost impossible to buy in 2017?

You know who abandoned ARM? Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD. I'm just agreeing with her. Funny how AMD shills have this huge hangup with even taking 5 minutes to figure out what the head of their religion actually says in public statements.

[Adarion]

Of course their efforts went down a little because of all the Ryzen and semi-custom x86 chips (gaming consoles, anyone?) as well as making Vega and the likes. Yes, but I hope the future will bring us some AMD-ARM-love. Seeing that board it does look intriguing. ARM on one side, but on the other there is real storage via SATA and there is no such strange usually-comes-with-ARM-but-is-crap-in-terms-of-drivers-GPU. Here you have, maybe for the first time in history, the change to pair some ARM with a decent GPU that works nicely in a FOSS environment. This can open the doors for real-world use at home by normal users. No messing and fiddling around with blobs that won't work on recent kernels or X servers, no half baked reverse engineered things that hardly present you 2d acceleration.

Now image an AMD ARM-APU for low-numbercrunching-powers but high-battery-lifetime laptops. (pair it with a decent keyboard (layout and keys) and some fullHD IPS panel) Mouth-watering, at least for me. (Okay, Gentoo installation and updates won't be awesome without some compiling power but you can't have everything)

I'm looking eagerly forward to the tests and benchmarks.

On the other hand - if Raven Ridge / Zen(+) scales extemely well they might be able to reach something similar with x86. Though I'd also prefer to have an option for ARM (RISC design, hopefully less blob-firmware).

[edwaleni]

This was designed and built for large OEMs and HP actually used them in their Moonshot cartridges. But client demand was weak at best. Some of the trials went out using SeaMicro (which is kaput now) based on their common platform approach for cloud. (where x64 and ARM daughter cards were interchangeable).

The power and BTU savings weren't as great as they hoped because the clients weren't using them in the scale they expected.

For now its a curiosity. It would be interesting if it competes with NVidia Jetson.

[starshipeleven]

Scared of what exactly?

Unknown, but reacting like that is a sign of fear.

You know who abandoned ARM? Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD. I'm just agreeing with her.

Ummm, any proof? Because currently there is pretty much silence on anything ARM related.

Funny how AMD shills have this huge hangup with even taking 5 minutes to figure out what the head of their religion actually says in public statements.

Funny how scared Intel fanbois need to claim AMD's CEO stated publicly stuff that Google could not even find.

[boxie]

oh - that is an interesting shiny, if only a curiosity

[M@yeulC]

I couldn't care less about the architecture, as long as it is supported in the open. AMD could roll their own instruction set, or maybe a RISC-V chip, and I would be quite happy if the perf/watt is good enough (and the perf itself, of course). Give us some completely open boards, with decent integrated GPUs, and completely change the raspberry-like segment.
Bonus points if it is compatible with standards technology (maybe produce different board form factors): PCI, Sata, DIMM, USB, etc...

I actually quite liked their initial plan to make x86 boards and sockets compatible with their ARM chips. The current instruction set segregation makes no sense in my opinion, especially if the software is open source and can be recompiled at will.