Jim Keller joined Mark Papermaster on stage at AMD's Core Innovation Update press conference and added a few more details to AMD's K12 announcement. Keller stressed AMD's expertise in building high frequency cores, as well as marrying the strengths of AMD's big cores with those of its low power cores. The resulting K12 core is a 64-bit ARM design, but Jim Keller also revealed that his team is working on a corresponding 64-bit x86 core.

The x86 counterpart doesn't have a publicly known name at this point, but it is a new design built from the ground up.

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  • Gizmosis350k - Wednesday, May 21, 2014 - link

    It's not like Intel cares about any of this, so fuck them
  • Alexvrb - Tuesday, May 6, 2014 - link

    Well until their new ground-up architecture is ready, they'd be better off with Puma+ backend.
  • Alexey291 - Tuesday, May 6, 2014 - link

    In all fairness (and I'm all for ARM being good competition to x86) but for majority of desktop workloads one DOES need more than what a 2ghz quadcore arm soc can offer atm. Especially if its a Krait core seeing how Quallcomm is kinda following the lower performance per clock strategy atm.
  • eanazag - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link

    I'll take this as good news. I'm glad to hear AMD is done working on its P4.
  • Gizmosis350k - Wednesday, May 7, 2014 - link

    I see what you did there

    fuck you
  • djc208 - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link

    I don't think it's lack of competition, just that their competition has changed. Low power use for longer mobil life, or cheaper data-center power bills has made ARM popular for both mobil devices and the server farms that feed them, add in all the embedded systems and it's not just the average user who is thinking that a relatively slow ARM core is "good enough" for what they need.

    Intel's processors have sacrificed large performance gains in the fight to reduce power consumption. AMD has almost given up on the drive to being the most powerful in order to try and bring in that "right sized" APUs while also increasingly trying to push power useage down in a bid to match Intel with options in the mobil space.
  • Anders CT - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link

    AMD has a shot at being relevant again. Thanks to mobile billions of dollars are being poured into independent foundries, which gives AMD better options than ever. Intel might still have a process-lead, but that lead matters less than it used to do.
  • azazel1024 - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link

    Intel hasn't hit much of a performance wall. They just have been choosing to funnel their improvements in to reducing power consumption, moving things on chip and improving GPU peformance.

    This has been at the expense of increasing CPU performance much, but look at performance per watt. Haswell is HUGELY beyond Sandy when you take that in to account.

    That I think is going to be where catching up is going to be hard. Power consumption matters to a lot of people. In mobile it is obvious, but it also ties in to the server market too and even home market with things like NUCs and HTPCs (and power bills).

    Intel just needs to decide to skip pouring process improvements in to reducing power consumption and drop it in to improving CPU performance for one tic-tock cycle and they'd probably have another 20-50% increase in performance over generation or two.

    Haswell-E (or is it Broadwell-E) is already confirmed for Octocore processors. That right there will be a nice jump. I'd be a little suprised if at some point Intel doesn't drop hexacore in to at least their high level non-E line up (even if they are still i7 only). Might take Skylake, might be a generation after, but I'd be surpised if it doesn't show up sooner rather than later.

    Really when it comes down to it, I want more CPU performance too, but I care a lot more about the power savings Intel has been dooling out, I just wish they could balance it across their platform with more performance targeted desktop architectures and more power oriented mobile architectures.
  • Gigaplex - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link

    Haswell isn't that much better at performance per watt under load. The power efficiencies mostly come from power gating under idle or semi idle conditions.
  • Hace - Monday, May 5, 2014 - link

    Unless you're on a notebook, then the power gains are massive even under load.

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