AMD launched a developer kit for its first processors based on ARM technology almost a year ago. Now the chip maker says those Opteron A1100 chips based on 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57 designs will ship in the second half of 2015. They’re designed for servers, but it’s possible something similar could also show up in mobile devices at some point.

So what’s next? AMD has more ARM-based chips in the works. But they won’t be available until 2017.

opteron a1100

The next-gen chips are code-named K12, and they’ll also be based on 64-bit, ARMv8 architecture. But instead of licensing a design such as Cortex-A53 or Cortex-A72 from ARM, AMD is using its own design for the upcoming K12 processor core.

amd k12

AMD isn’t sharing many details about its K12 chips yet, but they’re also aimed at servers and embedded devices… and they’re running behind schedule. The company had originally planned to launch K12 chips in 2016, but now that launch date has been pushed back a year.

Meanwhile, the company is killing off Project Skybridge. That was a project the company introduced last year to create pin-to-pin compatible chips based on x86 and ARM architecture, allowing system builders to use low-power chips using either technology in the same system.

via AnandTech, ExtremeTech, and AMD

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9 replies on “AMD’s new ARM chip plan: A1100 ships this year, K12 in 2017”

  1. What kind of servers are these chips targeting? For some companies, Intel Xeons are bottlenecking performance. For example, MS has been testing FPGA offloading for their servers. There was an announcement last year about them moving ahead with the FPGA project to thousands of servers.

    What advantages does ARM have over Intel Xeons? Maybe low load servers where even a single Xeon server is more than enough?

  2. I’m expecting to see Google and Amazon buying ARM server chips similar to how AMD sells PS4 and XBONE chips. The buyer owns the design and the seller gets a royalty for each chip produced. AMD, Broadcom or Qualcomm will be the main competitors… I don’t expect Intel to play that game.
    I don’t think A1100 was intended for low-volume customers.

  3. If ARM continues to be closed and proprietary then I’m not that excited about this. If AMD can at least provide long term support (5+ years) for their chips even closed source form then I can this going somewhere.

  4. If AMD wants to gain any sort of marketshare, maybe they should come up with something to sell us. Now.

  5. Yes! ARM is the future. AMD is finally taking good steps in the right direction.

    I like the ARM K12 idea sounds good to me.

    1. Yes, and it always remains the future! 🙂 For some reason the year of the ARM datacenter just comes after the year of the linux desktop.

      1. Oh I don’t know, I work at a place that’s playing around with publicly available ARM VMs currently (got something like 3TB of RAM attached to ARM cores to put things in perspective). The point is it does exist but it’s in no way cheap yet because while ARM has supported large amounts of RAM since ARMv7 no-one really did anything with that. Even now there aren’t many options if you want more than 2-4GB of RAM attached to a CPU, so what few options do exist cost a fortune offsetting the cost savings of ARM.

  6. I almost feel bad for AMD, their CPU and GPU markets are just doing bad.

Comments are closed.