Staying on big core for the x86 server market, where AMD had only one competitor (with a huge financial advantage) could still work out for them.
No, they can't. When AMD devoted most of their engineering resources, which were more than they were today, they were getting hopelessly behind, even if we discount Bulldozer. Now with significant diminished resources and spread thin between three core developments, I don't see AMD come back in conventional servers as more than a pipe dream.
In servers AMD situation is even worse than in desktops, because in servers there are benefits from packing more cores AND benefits for power consumption, so Intel can bring to bear a lot of high power SKUs with a lot of big cores AND a lot of SKUs with less cores but better power consumption, all this in more mature nodes, filling up all relevant price and performance price points and effectively shutting everything but niches for AMD.
There will be a time when AMD low sales figures won't justify all the investment in testing, validation and SG&A for the big core server market. And given AMD current server numbers, that time isn't too far down the road.
SR Opterons on 28nm FD-SOI would easily give a 50% performance increase (ST).
I'm really tired to see every company + dog from the SOI club touting benefits of the thing and nobody whose money depends on selling chips adopting the thing, except for AMD, and they have a reason for that.
AMD only went with SOI because IBM was willing to sell them a process, and AMD didn't have the money to develop process in-house. (for those who tend to see Intel and AMD as two giants of the same category fighting for the market, they aren't, and the differences start here).
And if the WSA is correct by ditching SOI AMD is going to save the paltry sum of 80 million dollars per year. When you have a magic dust that can give you 40% improvements in voltage for 0 additional manufacturing costs, this magic dust *is* worth 80 million dollars per year, and yet AMD refrained to pay those 80 millions.
While we all agree that AMD management isn't the most brilliant management team of the world, don't you think this decision is too stupid to pass on? If not for their intelligence, they would for their want of make money, and SOI would raise their annual bonus big time.
As for me, until I see someone whose life depends on manufacturing chips going with SOI, I'd refrain from believing on STM/GLF claims.
I now view AMD's move into ARM as dumb.
Agreed here. I don't think AMD has a better prospect with ARM than with x86, and in ARM they will face *a lot* of companies with *a lot* more financial muscles than them.
More than enough to keep them busy and they don't need to match Intel's release schedule on Server CPUs (which is actually slowing down anyway), so long as each 2 year iterations delivers substantial performance/watt gains over the previous model.
Not really. In order to succeed they must diminish the gap with Intel. There won't be any point in take 2 years to deliver substantial improvements in perf/watt and raw performance if Intel deliver more improvements and the gap grows. AMD will be lower and lower in the value ladder, and soon it won't be worth to build an AMD server.
Wanna have an idea on what I'm talking about? Look at AMD marketing. They went from talking big, things like data centers, cloud computing, HPC servers to this make huge events to announce affordable, single socket chips for... web hosting.