Replies to post #15200 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[chipguy]

Both ARM and MIPS cracked a joke a Webber's expense when they took the podium for the high performance embedded portion of the conference. I didn't stay for the Q&A session, but I have to wonder if Webber was grilled as he should have been.

You should have stayed for Q&A and asked him how his TFP
thing is working out. :-P

[sgolds]

wbmw, that is one speculation, I can provide another -

I think it speaks of an uncertain corporate strategy, if you ask me. AMD thinks they are the first one to advocate a single instruction set, and it was more than insulting to ARM and MIPS...

The other possibility is that Alchemy has IP in the area of embedded design which can be applied to embedded x86. Alchemy may very well head up that task, merging Geode into Alchemy.

Going further on a limb ... Microsoft has been working hard to enter the embedded market, with varying success. Perhaps they negotiated a better platform commitment from AMD as part of the package of AMD64 porting.

Some PDA impressions:

I tried a Microsoft PDA once, a Toshiba e740. Found it very frustrating because the pocket version of Word did not read desktop Word files. Other little things bothered me also. A 400MHz handheld computer with 64M DRAM - and it can't run compatible with a desktop? Wound up selling the item on eBay and recovering most of my costs.

An x86 embedded could very well run 32-bit Windows and applications, if Microsoft goes in that direction. It would make a much better product!

[blauboad]

Meanwhile, Sun's keynote had a similar theme, but their solution was to solve the problem using software (i.e. Java). That seems to me a better solution than using x86 (or in AMD's case, their self-serving AMD64 advocacy), when it clearly doesn't come close to meeting the low power and high embedded performance of ARM/MIPS

To be fair, Java is a pretty inefficient solution, particularly for resource-starved embedded processors, and we have not yet seen an AMD64 embedded processor. Certainly the Hammers aren't going to work in a PDA, but that does not mean the instruction set cannot be deployed in a stripped-down, low power design.

Both ARM and MIPS cracked a joke a Webber's expense when they took the podium for the high performance embedded portion of the conference

Not surprising, since Weber basically was proposing to make their companies, expertise, and designs obsolete. Whatever you think of likelihood of Weber's proposal, you gotta admit he's got some balls to announce it at a forum attended mostly by non-x86 people.