Ronald Maas (rmaas.delete@this.wiwo.nl) on August 15, 2014 11:14 pm wrote:
.....
>
> So for now AMD and Applied Micro would be my pick for the top dogs in the ARM server space.
> First generation seems to be good enough to generate some revenue and to start the ball rolling.
> But 2nd or 3rd generation is going to be critical for real longer term success.
>
> May you live in interesting times

I'm not altogether sure about AMD. It doesn't have a pot of money or another business it can use the processors in. Broadcom and Applied Micro for instance can use their processors in their core business and Broadcom has got money. The big deciding factor I think in the end will be how good they are in fitting into particular market segments or whether they are good at producing SoCs with their processor in as a component for large customers. At least AMD have got expertise in that with their games chips. Producing general purpose server chips and directly competing against Intel will be difficult, but the widest reasonably accessible market like that is web servers with good networking - and that does have real possibilities.

The comparison with spec benchmarks to top level Xeons is a bit beside the point. The POWER processors are already in that market and it isn't really sensible to go up against that as a first aim. It isn't the mass market ARM has been in. As to RAS etc features though ARM has had a bit of experience in real time control with things like three synchronized processors working at the same time on the same data. The requirements for even tiny processors can very stringent indeed.