By: Linus Torvalds (torvalds.delete@this.linux-foundation.org), February 22, 2021 6:06 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
Dummond D. Slow (mental.delete@this.protozoa.us) on February 22, 2021 1:34 pm wrote:
>
> I don't disagree on the principle but hurdles for getting into phone market are
> so high it makes almost no sense to try to butt in forcefully - for AMD.
The only place I see AMD succeeding with an ARM strategy would be with a strong partner that didn't want to do their own chips.
The main one that comes to mind is Microsoft, but they went with Qualcomm. That end result obviously hasn't been earth-shattering, but it's not like MS has really shown any inclination of going all-in on ARM, so who knows where the blame lies.
The server (mainly big cloud providers) market seems to just want to do their own chips entirely, and it's not clear what would be in it for AMD. That market would seem to make more sense for a small chip house that wants to be bought out, than for somebody like AMD.
The phone/tablet market is already locked in, as you say.
So what ARM market does that leave AMD? They can't create a market for ARM chips on their own, and the existing ones don't seem like great fits. A Surface partnership with Microsoft still seems like the best option to me, but you'd have to have a great core and go to MS and say "look, the Qualcomm partnership isn't doing it for you, here's what we can do".
And then hope that the WARM market really takes off.
Considering how well AMD is doing on the x86 side, they may not have a lot of incentive to really try to grow the WARM market, though. Yeah, competing against Intel isn't always wonderful, but competing against everybody else doesn't seem to be the solution either. Waiting for Intel to stumble seems to have worked out for them.
Linus
>
> I don't disagree on the principle but hurdles for getting into phone market are
> so high it makes almost no sense to try to butt in forcefully - for AMD.
The only place I see AMD succeeding with an ARM strategy would be with a strong partner that didn't want to do their own chips.
The main one that comes to mind is Microsoft, but they went with Qualcomm. That end result obviously hasn't been earth-shattering, but it's not like MS has really shown any inclination of going all-in on ARM, so who knows where the blame lies.
The server (mainly big cloud providers) market seems to just want to do their own chips entirely, and it's not clear what would be in it for AMD. That market would seem to make more sense for a small chip house that wants to be bought out, than for somebody like AMD.
The phone/tablet market is already locked in, as you say.
So what ARM market does that leave AMD? They can't create a market for ARM chips on their own, and the existing ones don't seem like great fits. A Surface partnership with Microsoft still seems like the best option to me, but you'd have to have a great core and go to MS and say "look, the Qualcomm partnership isn't doing it for you, here's what we can do".
And then hope that the WARM market really takes off.
Considering how well AMD is doing on the x86 side, they may not have a lot of incentive to really try to grow the WARM market, though. Yeah, competing against Intel isn't always wonderful, but competing against everybody else doesn't seem to be the solution either. Waiting for Intel to stumble seems to have worked out for them.
Linus
