Replies to post #121461 on Intel Corp (INTC)

[Tenchu]

Dmcq, thanks for the link. I'll go further than what Chipguy said.

But first, here is the original quote from AMD:

"There are two separate questions, in my mind, that need to be asked," says Feldman. "Will ARM win in servers? And will AMD win with ARM? I think ARM wins in the long run. In the history of compute, small, lower cost, and higher volume always wins. And community always wins. ARM has lower power, but I don't think, in the end, that it wins because it is lower power. It wins because it is lower cost. It takes the process of making a CPU down from three and a half years and $350m and $400m down to 18 months and $30m."

The problem is that neither Intel nor AMD develops new (x86) core designs specifically for their server platforms. Instead, they reuse the same cores from their desktop and mobile designs. That's where the cost of CPU core development is allocated.

Hence the cost argument is B.S. because AMD already reuses their own x86 cores for servers. It would only make sense if one day AMD decided to drop all x86 core development, including for desktop and mobile platforms. Then adopting the ARM core would make more sense than having to create one from scratch. But AFAIK that isn't happening.

So AMD would have to go with ARM in servers for other reasons. Maybe it'd be power, even though AnandTech already proved that x86 is NOT inherently more power-hungry than ARM. Maybe it'd be name-recognition, since ARM is the hot topic these days. But as of now, it can't be cost.

Tenchu